There has been a lot of talk lately about the viral nature of Facebook and Twitter and how it can help build a person’s business. Initially, I took very little notice but the chatter was getting louder and louder, so I decided to look into it.

It didn’t take me long to find out that both of these sites were enormously popular. I had thought that most of the people using these social networking sites were teens, but I was in for a surprise when I saw how many serious and well-known business people had a Facebook and a Twitter page.

It didn’t make much sense to me, so I decided to talk to some people I know who are part of the social networking system and they reported back to me that they were actually ‘doing business’ when they were using these social websites. They said that visits to their personal websites were up dramatically and their sales were also.

The first thing I realized was that the people that were getting the most out of these sites were taking it very seriously. It wasn’t something that they did as a little diversion – it was actually scheduled into their business day. There are now courses that you can take that teach you how to most effectively operate your Facebook and Twitter pages.

Newbies tend to add friends at a frantic pace, but this is not recommended, particularly for business people. Quality is more important that quantity, especially for the first 100-200 people you invite to be your ‘friend’. This intial group of people will be the most impactful and you want to make these high level people in your industry.

Another suggestion is to add content to your sites on a daily basis, if at all possible. You don’t have to spend a lot of time. Sometimes just 5 minutes a day is sufficient. You could update your status, pull up news feeds and comment as much as you can. The search engines love content so try to continually be adding relevant information to your pages.

These website are growing faster than the speed of light. Facebook is the 5th largest visited website in the entire World and Twitter is actually adding more users a day that Facebook. Because you are limited to leaving a very small message on Twitter, it literally only takes seconds to post and you can do it as many times a day as you like. To top it off, they are both free services.

I now have my own Facebook and Twitter accounts and I invite you to sign up also.