June 6, 2009

Social Networking 101: How Internet Marketers Should Use Online Social Networking Sites

Sites that feature social networking and online social bookmarking are more popular now than ever. It can be a little difficult, however, when it comes to knowing which to choose. That’s why so many Internet users find reviews of these type of sites so helpful. When reading these reviews, though, you may find that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Many folks fight for their choice of online social networking sites vehemently. That may be due, however, to being unaware of all the available options, so all their time was taken up with one site before they knew what was happening. Some people fight for their choice without even knowing the differences between business networking, bookmarking sites or sites that feature social networking as a means for people to have fun, date, play games or do various other entertainment-related activities. Many are not aware that there are also social networking sites, like Capazoo, that use micropayments to incentivize users to visit the site and promote it to others.

People often don’t know the difference between online social networks because there is enormous overlap of features on the various sites. Sites such as Facebook can be used just for fun or for serious business networking, or both! And there are literally tens of thousands of Ning sites, such as Vintage Life Network, which specialize in narrow niches. These online social networking sites are important due to their emphasis on people’s niche interests. And speaking of niches, book readers now have plenty of places to hang out online. Online social networks , like Shelfari have book reviews and other features created just for people who love to read. Another powerful form of social networking is online social bookmarking, because it opens up new worlds of information storage and retrieval. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us allow people to save their favorite bookmarks so they can access them online any time. This platform type is also great for people who conduct searches, because tagging is allowed The ability to use keyword tagging also is of value to Web marketers, because they can get backlinks for their Web properties. One social bookmark doesn’t really mean anything in terms of backlinks but when there are many of them, search traffic often increases. And with sites such as Digg, if a URL is posted on one of these bookmarking sites that has good pagerank, top search engine rankings can be had for that page if it has good keyword tags and was submitted correctly.

Social media boundaries become even less defined on sites like Digg, which feature both online social networking and bookmarking. These sites are used for bookmarking but they also have legions of people who frequent them for marketing or socializing. There are a lot of friends and business contacts to be found on these types of Web properties and as a bonus, material placed on them oftentimes ranks well in Google. This makes these type of sites genuine gold to Internet marketers.

Filed under Site Promotion by Internet Marketing News

Permalink Print Comment

Leave a Comment

Subscribe without commenting