It has been pointed out to you the need to make more use of your social networking sites and the reasons for doing so whether they be for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) reasons or a general part of your e-marketing strategies. The sticking point to making this worthwhile and effective though is building a decent sized friend/follower base.

If you are looking for a modest click through rate or interaction for your posts of say 1-5% of your followers then you'd be looking at a friend base of around 1,000 to make any interaction worthwhile.Tens of thousands would be optimum. Otherwise, you run the risk of spending a lot of your time and effort communicating with very small numbers of people for very little gain.

These are our list of reccomendations for improving your signup rate on you social networking sites:

1. Consolidate your sites. Look at consolidating any multiple social networking pages you have to minimise the sites you have to update and promote and maximise the number of users you can interact with at any one time. This will also avoid any confusion of the users part about which sites are the "real you".

2. Use your Social Networking sites in a proactive way. Instead of just using these sites to push information at your customer try to get more interactive. Engage with customers, take part in discussions, show interest in related areas. This will make your friends and followers much more likely to take an interest in what you are saying, making them visit you or read your posts even when they are not in a buying frame of mind. This way, when you do decide to promote an product,say, you will have a captive audience.

3. Promote Social Networking links. Promote your social networking sites like you promote your home page. E-Mails, company literature, ads etc. Make sure links are prominant and visible on at least the home page of your website.

4. Look at the possibility of offering an incentive for customer to sign up. Unless you are offering a really exciting or hip product you will probably find that the above methods provide a very slow sign up rate until you get over a certain threshold where you find that signups start to feedback on themselves. Most companies will probably need to offer some kind of incentive for people to sign up. Discounts, cash prices, prize draws, freebies and inside information have all been used to entice users to follow your tweets.

5. Facebook advertising and other online promotions.