Social Networking: Benefits for Online Marketers

Online networking and social bookmarking are all the rage today. But it’s hard to know which online social network is right for you if you haven’t tried all of them. That’s where social media reviews come in. When you read the reviews, though, you may find that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Many folks defend their choice of online social networking sites vehemently. That might be because they were ignorant of the options, so they invested all their time without further research. I’ve known a few who fought for their choice without even knowing the difference between business networking sites, bookmarking sites or sites that feature online 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 online 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 social networks because there is a tremendous amount of overlap of features on the various sites. Sites such as Facebook can be used just for fun or for serious business networking, or both! There are thousands upon thousands of user-driven free Ning social networking communities, such as Vintage Life Network, which specialize in focused interests. These sites are really where the rubber hits the road when it comes to free social networking because they’re completely user-driven and allow focused conversations surrounding people’s interests. Communities focused on interests, such as book readers, abound. Online social networking sites like Shelfari have everything from chats, book reviews and online bookshelves. Another powerful form of online networking is online social bookmarking, because it opens up new worlds of information storage and retrieval. Sites that feature social bookmarking, such as Mister Wong, allow logged-in users to save their online bookmarks for free. These sites are also powerful for people who are searching for information, because keyword tags that allow for easy searching can be assigned to each bookmark. This ability also makes these sites tremendous for Internet marketers, because backlinks result from the use of bookmarks. The individual links aren’t that impactful but when you add them all together, they become influential in search engine rankings. As with Digg, when a link is posted on these web properties, high Google rankings can result if it is submitted correctly and has the right keywords associated with it.

Blurring the line even further are sites like Digg, which are set up for both social networking and social bookmarking. These sites are used for bookmarking but they also have legions of people who frequent them for marketing or socializing. Business and personal contacts galore are just waiting to be discovered on these sites and blog posts featured on these 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.