Social media in the form of social networking and online bookmarking have grown in popularity in the last five years. 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 reading the reviews, however, you might be shocked at how people’s opinions vary widely. Many folks defend their choice of online social networking sites vehemently. That’s probably because the site they fell in love with is one of the few they tried and they invested all their time without further research. Some of those who are insistent about their choice don’t even know the difference between business networking websites, social bookmarking sites and online social networking sites that are primarily there for fun. Even some avid social media users don’t know that there are also social networking platforms, like Capazoo, that use small amounts of money per click to pay for people to use and promote their sites.
People often don’t know the distinction between one form of online social networking and another because there is a lot of cross-over in the platforms. As an example, Facebook can be used for either business networking or to just have fun. And there are literally tens of thousands of Ning sites, such as New Energy Network, which specialize in narrow niches. These social network sites are important due to their emphasis on people’s niche interests. Niches can be as specific as book aficionados, who now have many online communities geared just to them. Online social networking sites like LibraryThing have everything from chats, book reviews and online bookshelves. An innovative variant of social networking is online 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. Social bookmarking sites also are a great help to Web searchers, because keyword tags that allow for easy searching can be assigned to each bookmark. Tagging also makes social bookmarking sites of great interest to online marketers, because they can get backlinks for their Web properties. A single social bookmark link doesn’t carry a lot of weight but in aggregate, they matter. As with Mixx, when a link is posted on these web properties, top search engine rankings can be had for that page if it has good keyword tags and was submitted properly.
Social media boundaries become even less defined on sites like Digg, which allow 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. You can make a lot of friends on these sites and links posted to these social networking platforms sometimes rank well in the search engines. These powerful benefits are just some of the reasons that people who make their livings online love social media sites.
