Last week I talked about the first part of Social Networking and the 4 Corners of Web Marketing. This is part 2 of the series on social networking for business and focuses on using social networks for your business.

Hopefully you were able to get setup on on of the following over the past week - Facebook, Linkdin, Pownce orTwitter. When you do sign up for social networks, do an extensive search to see if any of your past colleagues, co-workers, friends, family members or high school pals are on the network. This is how you are going to start to build your online network where you will find and share information.

I’m going to list a few ways below in which you can use these networks for your business:

Join groups where your customers are and contribute: On Facebook you can join a whole number of groups and networks. For example, I am part of the Web 2.0 Entrepreneur’s network, this is a place where not only may there be some business owners that can use my services, I can also connect with people that I may use in my business such as a programmer or whatnot.

Find Employees: Looking for people to work for your business? Send a job description out to your network, there’s got to be someone that knows someone.

Find someone in a friend’s network you’ve been dying to meet: How would you know that someone in your network knew the CEO of XXXXX company? Well on social networks, you can view other people acquaintances very easily and ask for an introduction. Much more effective than blind calling.

Start you own groups: Have a frisbee company and looking for a test market? Start a Facebook user group and send out the free frisbee’s. Great way to test market a product.

There are so many creative ways to use Social Networking in your business, the sky is the limit. I believe it will start to become more and more important as users reach larger and large numbers. Why not be ahead of the curve?

Next week I am going to do a full recap on The 4 Corners of Web Marketing and move this column along to some more advanced uses of this type of marketing. As always - If you ever have any questions on the article, feel free to contact me or post comments below.