Social Networking Sites: Hidden Benefits for Online Marketers

Online networking and social bookmarking are all the rage today. It can be hard to know which to choose, however, because there are so many of them. That’s where social media reviews come in. When reading the reviews, however, you might be surprised at how much variation there is in people’s assessments. Some people would fight for their social media choices to the bitter end. That might be because they were ignorant of the options, so all their time was taken up with one site before they knew what was happening. Some people defend their choice without even knowing the variations business networking, social bookmarking sites and social networking communities that are primarily there for fun. Many people don’t know that there also are online social networking sites, like Yuwie, that pay for people to use and promote them.

Many social media users aren’t aware of the variations between social networks because there is a tremendous amount of overlap of features on the various sites. For example, Facebook can be used for business or pleasure. And there are literally tens of thousands of Ning sites, such as Book Market, which specialize in narrow niches. These social network sites are important because they’re created by users and focus on distinct interests. Niches can be as specific as book aficionados, who now have many online communities geared just to them. Social networking websites , like Shelfari have book reviews and other features created just for people who love to read. An innovative variant of social networking is social bookmarking, because it opens up new worlds of information storage and retrieval. Social bookmarking sites like Reddit 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 searches are greatly enhanced by tagging. This ability also makes these sites tremendous for Internet marketers, because they can get backlinks for their Web properties. The individual links aren’t that impactful 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, it can often rank high in Google if the person who submitted it understands how to research keyword tags and has entered the listing properly.

Confusing the issue even more are sites like Mixx, which allow social networking and social bookmarking. They are used for bookmarking but also are equally great for marketing and socializing. There are a lot of friends and business contacts to be found on these types of Web properties and blog posts featured on these online social networking sites have the potential to rank well in Google and other search engines. Great benefits such as these are the reason people who make their livings online love online social media sites.