There are two schools of thoughts on this. 

One is more of a hard core, in-your-face, almost used-car-salesman-y method. Some say using the first method goes directly against the spirit f why social net­work­ing sites were created. 

The sec­ond school of thought is more of a long-view, care­ful approach. Some say that it’s too touchy-feely and not profit-oriented. 

The truth is you have to look at your mar­ket, look at each method, and decide which one is right for you and your busi­ness. I find the sec­ond one much more prof­itable and effec­tive, but then, my audi­ence is fel­low busi­ness own­ers, who already have thriv­ing busi­nesses and want a solution. 

If your audi­ence is the “get rich quick” or “lose weight now” crowd, you prob­a­bly want to go with the first method.

So here are the two meth­ods, in brief. 

The first method is, get as many followers/friends/connections as you can on the site, and sell to them as hard and as fast as you can. 

Exactly how to do that is a longer story. 

This method is eas­ier to do — how hard is it to get most peo­ple to accept a new “friend”? Not very. 

The down side is high turnover. As soon as peo­ple fig­ure out you’re con­nected to them because you want to blast your mes­sage over and over, a good per­cent­age of them will just leave. 

You also really have to learn how to main­tain a con­stant, respect­ful flow of infor­ma­tion with­out spam­ming. It’s a bit dif­fi­cult for some­one new to the inter­net to under­stand what is spam and what’s a com­mer­cial message. 

It’s pretty sim­ple. If that per­son agreed to com­mu­ni­cate with you with full knowl­edge of what kind of infor­ma­tion you are going to send them and how often, it’s not spam. Always make it easy for the other per­son to turn it off as well. 

In the sec­ond school of thought, you tar­get an audi­ence as closely as you can, and put your­self in that con­ver­sa­tion stream. 

You offer to be help­ful when you can, and at first just “be-friend” or con­nect with, peo­ple you already are acquainted with through busi­ness or social inter­ac­tion, online or off, who share your interests. 

Espe­cially those that inter­sect with your business. 

Then you set up your profile/ group/business page/community and keep your chan­nel of infor­ma­tion flow con­stant, so that your tar­get mar­ket comes to YOU. 

It’s slower growth, but you end up with a more tar­geted audi­ence that is more proactive. 

I call it “social pres­ence mar­ket­ing”. You mar­ket by being there, not by being in your face. 

I’ve tried both, the sec­ond way made me more money and I was much more com­fort­able with man­ag­ing it. The turnover is very low, and I know that every per­son on my list wants to be there and wants my news or updates. 

In fact, some­times they get testy if they haven’t heard from me in a while and will say so in public. 

Nice lit­tle ego stroke. But that’s a bonus.

I know. That rhymed. Don’t taze me bro!

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