What is the best way for a new site to get started and how do you get followers/fans?

Just starting out with social networking for a business and was wondering what's the best way to start and what kind of different strategies do you guys use to get followers/fans and talk about your product? I prefer not to spam anyone.

 

try sites that exchange fans for free

 

What do you mean by exchange fans? Since I just started, I currently do not have any fans to exchange.

 

At the moment I am mainly using backlink building, blog commenting and social networking to get traffic for my site/s. If you have Facebook pages, sites with Google +1 button, and Twitter, you might find these sites useful in getting likes, follows, and +1's...

http://www.youlikehits.com/
http://www.likespal.com/
http://www.likeviews.com/
http://getlikes.eu/
http://letusfollow.com/

I have used numerous sites like these and notice some of them look very similar towards each other... Am trying to think of a footprint for these sites I can use to search for more of them in Google.

I also have noticed something awesome with Facebook likes (I know this has been right in front of me for years, but only just took notice in the last few weeks) is that for every person/page that likes your page, your updates will be shown on their walls. So if you have 200 likes for a page your updates will show on 200 peoples walls (unless they block your updates etc).

 

A few ways of increasing fans and followers of your social networking profiles
1. Create an interesting profile using your Business name (prefer NOT to use your niche as your username)
2. Publish quality wall posts (informative, engrossing and try to add fun angle into it)
3. Join niche related groups and invite people to join your community
4. Respond to comments and requests responsibly
5. Handle criticism with good spirit (do not delete negative comments, in fact use them to strengthen your credibility)
6. Facebook is very active channel (if you missed to respond on time, you may lose the game)
7. Talk about your website and provide a website link wherever required (but do not throw it everywhere on your wall)

 

Good content and interaction would definitely get you good amount of followers/fans.

 

Thanks everyone for their great suggestions! Will try them out!

 

Good content and introduce offers to catch their attention...

 

try the fan exchange sites, or to get a quick amount of likes to your page fast, you can always buy likes from a service provider like rocketfacebookfans.com

 

Follow people that are following others, they are likely to follow you back.

 

craete profiles on social bookmarking sites and follow and join groups helps you to increase your fans..

 

To get more likes in Facebook, your page should have unique content and your ads should be interesting that visitor would like to read or avail your products. Also there some technique that would probably help to increase the traffic of your website like Social Bookmarking, Social Media, Blog Commenting and many others.