It can sometimes be hard to be personal on a website. Your main goal is to sell products anyway, so what’s the point of interacting with a customer and providing a human face to match the strings of code driving the website?

Giving your company a little personality can start to build trust which is essential for a potential visitor. And if you utilize some of social media’s easy to use, free gathering places, you may even start driving extra traffic to your website!

The most recent hotspot on the Internet is Facebook. Initially just for college students, they’ve expanded to accept everyone regardless of academic status and provide quite a few avenues for networking purposes. Think of it as a more mature MySpace (which is becoming less and less relevant, especially for businesses). If you’re focused on selling in a higher age bracket than teenagers, Facebook is the way to go.

Twitter is the up-and-coming website that is starting to hit mainstream status. It limits the message you can post to 140 characters, so you can easily and quickly give potential customers updates on your products, offer Twitter-only coupons, or even ask for feedback. Companies have gotten pretty creative in how they use Twitter; you can generate buzz with an offbeat idea that catches fire throughout the blogosphere.

And that’s what social media is all about - providing people with a community area to engage in discussion. If somebody can ask you a question on Twitter and get a response, they know that you’re around, that you care about your company, and they may be that much more encouraged to purchase from you.