Social media continues to connect individuals together. Business have also found ways to keep connected to individuals—not to socialize, but to make a sale off of these contacts. Social media, most notably Facebook, Twitter and Google+, continue to provide cheap, effective alternatives than traditional contact forms and email listing. Social media keeps evolving and providing a new platform for business to promote to clients.

Social media helps with your company’s visibility. The more people that subscribe to your news feeds, the more you can showcase new products that future clients might enjoy. Say you have a new product line launching in a few months; social media can help build the hype surrounding the items to get consumers interested.

This type of visibility helps increase your sales and gives you the chance to make new contacts. The more people that know about your products, the more likely you are to make a sale. Use Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ to demonstrate new products and create clout surrounding about any included features and models you will release.

Marketing tends to be the most expensive necessity for businesses. SEO, SEM and traditional avenues of promoting products can be costly; social media can drive down the costs of these expensive alternatives. Individuals can invest little and generate huge dividends.

Say you’re launching a new service at your beauty salon. You want to promote the new service, so you ask clients to add and like your Facebook page. Once an individual likes your page, she is automatically entered into a contest to promote the new service. Your client who likes you page now has a visible link in her news feed to show to her friends as well.

A simple giveaway can attract buzz and help increase traffic to your store or website. Social marketing is simple, cheap and cost-effective. Granted, you still might need traditional avenues of promoting a business, but social media can turn into another cheap alternative. Online classes can help people figure out the most effective ways of marketing.

The more individuals who visit your Facebook page, the more likely your business is to grow in popularity. Use social media to create links back to your website. SEO and SEM attempt to generate links to create higher traffic, but both services costs a bit of money. With Facebook, Google+ and even Twitter, you can create additional links, and make contact with individuals interested in your services.

Say you were the dean for an online university and you wanted to create more traffic to a website. You would use a social outlet to gain popularity and direct more traffic to your website via contacts. The process does take some time to master, but with time and patience, you can easily promote a business or organization without the added costs.

Social media continues to evolve. New websites pop up to offer different methods of communicating and staying in touch with people. As the media evolves, your company strategies should as well.