Having an active presence in Facebook and Twitter will give you instant access to your current audience and customers, and the potential for many more is huge. When someone becomes a Facebook Fan or Twitter Follower of your brand, it will be knowledge which is obtainable for all the friends and followers of that individual. This gives you the opportunity to establish further name recognition. So instantly your company or blog name is in front of many more people than just your current audience. Chances are some of those people will become Fans and Followers too. The number of people can snowball quickly. If you are able to drive a portion of these new found Fans and Followers to your site, you’ll get a boost in traffic and have the opportunity to convert these Fans and Followers into your regular audience.

If you are seeking ways to increase your social marketing audience, here are three ideas worth exploring.

1. Entice followers with coupons. Let your potential customer base know that you’ll offer special coupons only available to social network followers. These coupons can be announced with tweets and status updates. Many retailers have had success with reaching their online customer base by offering percentage off discounts in this manner.

2. Give things away. Who doesn’t like free stuff? There is one success story where a franchise dangled $15 gifts out to the first 100,000 individuals who became a Facebook Fan. The strategy worked like a charm. In less than four days the 100,000 Fan mark was achieved. Analytic tracking indicated that many of those new Fans went on to make purchases in subsequent months. The franchise now had 100,000 new eyeballs to read regular status updates and target for future purchases.

3. Don’t be afraid to just ask for followers. Placing the recognizable Facebook and Twitter Icons on your website will let your current audience know that you are engaged in the social marketing world. They are already at your site, chances are they’d like to be up to date on what you are doing and offering. The icons offer easy access, in just a few clicks they can begin following you, and you’ll be thee beneficiary.

Leslie Handmaker has a site specializing in gifts for friends and celebrating friendships. She also offers marketing support and project management to small businesses on a contract basis.

In the hope to drum up some interest in the new project, he is also giving away a Ipod Nano (to one lucky winner) for those who spread the word about him. Heck I would have done it for free too. Shameless promotion aside, reading some of his posts he has up thus far I am highly impressed and can’t wait to read more. Might have to try to get him on the podcast too.

Host Color Offers Thanksgiving Deal
Web hosting provider Hostcolor.com announced on Friday it is offering through December 1 a special Thanksgiving promotion that offers a 20 percent discount on shared hosting plans.

Hostway Gives Away Business Makeover
Customers who purchase specific Hostway and ValueWeb products before December 14 will automatically be entered in the draw for $5000 (USD) worth of Hostway services.

Designers – Win a Xbox 360 or $400!
Lunarpages is holding a contest for our new t-shirt design, and you are all invited to submit your designs via our community forums.

AIT Offers Free iPod Nanos
Web hosting provider and domain registrar Advanced Internet Technologies, Inc. is offering free iPod nanos as part of its “Holiday Tunes Promotion”, the company announced recently.

So what am I going to give away this year? Well since we had such good luck with giving away one free hosting account the year before, I thought this year we would do the same – but on a much bigger level. That is right, I am going to be handing out even more free Web hosting accounts.

This year’s big sponsor of the free hosting plans if Plzhost.com. They have offered up the following:

Disk Space: 200 MB
Bandwidth: 10 GB

They want to give away two free plans for life and three plans for six months of free hosting. On the six month plans – after the six months is up you will get $1.00 off the monthly fee or the yearly fee.

Want your own free Web hosting account? Just drop me an E-mail and let me know why you like the Web Hosting Show! Could winning something be any easier?