My last post largely focused on the quality difference between television and online viewers of advertisements. This article is switching gears slightly by discussing how any company, regardless of size, can build an online presence with no investment other than a little time here and there.

Suppose you are a product manager or business owner and you are looking to promote your product or service but have little-to-no budget for brand promotion – what can you do? Ruling out conventional advertising is easy – that is, no television, radio or print promotion. You consider online advertising, but even that can be costly. This is where the juggernaut that is social media becomes your gateway to building an online presence for your brand.

There are many social media tools you can use to promote your brand, I will focus on two of the most popular, Facebook and Twitter. These tools can be used interchangeably or on their own by anyone – from brand managers at giant corporations to small business owners. The technical skills required are minimal, the only necessities include consistency, relevancy, and frequency of updates.

Facebook has, in a relatively short period of time, become one of the largest social networking applications available online – connecting nearly 200 million individuals across the globe. How can you leverage this massive network to build an online presence for your brand? The key is Facebook Pages – a tool used by businesses, websites, and artists to create brand presence and awareness within the Facebook community. The page builder guides you through the steps of adding content and customizing the look of your Facebook page. At anytime you can easily update your page as well as add links, photos, and video that are related to your brand.

When it comes to managing and maintaining your Facebook page it is critical to keep it up-to-date – you need to maintain fan interest by providing them with relevant information on a regular basis. Combine this with a little self-promotion to friends, family, and colleagues and your network will start to grow. Maintain your fan interest and you will have successfully built an online presence within the Facebook community!

Twitter, to those that do not “tweet”, defines itself as “a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time.” I was a relatively early adopter of Twitter and have seen the service through outage-ridden scalability issues all the way to the recent media obsession with the service. The key to using Twitter as a brand promotion tool is to provide your followers with regular updates related to your brand. This could be a new feature, a link to an article mentioning your product or service, giveaways, and anything else you can write in under 140 characters that may be of interest to your followers. For example, Digg, a social news website, uses Twitter to provide their followers with updates related to the company. Their Twitter profile, @Digg, (@ is the character preceding the Twitter username) has over twenty thousand followers who receive regular updates with regard to the company.

Similar to Facebook, the key to gaining followers is to build up an initial group of followers and allow social networking to take its course. Be sure to provide your followers with interesting and relevant updates so they continue to follow your “tweets”. Brand spamming and providing irrelevant information to your followers is a quick way to lose them so be sure to provide them with well thought-out content. Nothing helps more than the occasional giveaway to a random follower.

In practice, why not take these two concepts and combine them? If you have a Facebook page set up, promote your Twitter feed from Facebook using a link or dedicate post. From Twitter, use Bit.ly or TinyURL to share your Facebook page with your Twitter followers. Many of us have accounts with Facebook and Twitter so use this cross-promotion to your advantage and combine your networks.

In conclusion, there are hundreds of ways to use social media to build an online presence, these are just two that have been pioneering the way brand presence can be both created and maintained online. Provide your fans and followers with relevant information on a regular basis and your brand can reach tens of thousands of quality consumers that, according to Gary Vaynerchuck, act as your “crusader, [your] word of mouth sprayer” – something that cannot be easily achieved by using mass marketing alone.