Social Networking Sites

Posted by Average Joe on February 2, 2009 under Social Media | Be the First to Comment

Social networking is becoming one of the biggest attractions on the internet and there is probably a good reason why. Especially from a marketing point of view social networking, is very much a growing phenomena.

Where you are probably more familiar with networking in the respect that you have friends and business associates that you connect with on a daily basis, within your community or area that you work and live. Social networking on the internet can amplify the real potential of connecting with not just friends and business associates on a local level but on a global level.

But knowing about social networking on the internet and knowing where the best places are for it to happen are two different things. Below you will find a number of sites that really enable social networking on the internet.

Status or Short Message Sites

  • http://www.twitter.com – A site that lets you connect with many different people, from around the world and send short status updates not more then 140 characters. Links are allowed and url shortening services are your best bet to Maximize your message. Also great for updating friends about new blog posts.
  • http://www.plurk.com – Similar to twitter, in the limit to characters, however Plurk will also show you your updates and your friends and associates updates in a time line fashion. Additionally Plurk uses a karma meter, which has a range of things that are defined as good or bad and rewards or deducts depending on your actions

Community sites

  • http://www.facebook.com - Facebook is a personal networking site primarily designed for you to form networks with your friends and family. The site includes a status update option which works similar to plurk and twitter, however you can also share more details about yourself, photo’s video and much more between yourself and other users. To some extent Facebook is also getting taken on by businesses in some ways, however the primary design here is not entirely business friendly.
  • http://www.linkedin.com – Similar in the style of site to Facebook, LinkedIn is the business equivalent. This is the website that you can choose to connect more so with your work colleges then your friends (although they may be one and the same). As expected many of the game type or not business relevant features are dropped. There are also a range of additional features that you can gain through payment, and truly some of them may be worth it depending on what you hope to gain.

Blogging

  • http://www.blogger.com – About the easiest way to get started with a blog, if you have a Google account already even easier. The process is pretty easy log-in with Google account, choose name of blog and address, choose template for blog and you are away. Blogger is a very easy option for posting your blog to the world, it is a limited option, but especially if you are just starting it will get you started.
  • http://www.wordpress.com – Wordpress, is one of the most popular blogging platform’s, in fact this website itself is build on Wordpress. At wordpress.com, you are able to create your own blog with many of the same features as if you were hosting wordpress on your own site. While some of the features do differ slightly, it is a powerful option to get started with.

Forum’s

To some extent forums offer some of the same features that are included in most of the other types of site’s the primary difference is that there are many more forum’s on different subjects and offering different information, that esentially each one is a little bit different to the other. In some respects, they are alike, but in many respect’s most forums differ. A few that i personally am a member at which may be useful to visitor’s here are.

Social Bookmarking and Linking

  • http://www.digg.com – You can add a link here, and based on the number of people that also share the same link determines the popularity of the link moving it up or down the ranking.
  • http://www.delicious.com – A site where you can store all your bookmarks and have the ability to access them from any computer. Also acts kind of like dig dependent on the popularity of a bookmark moves the link up or down the rankings.
  • http://www.stumbleupon.com – This takes the idea of sharing something like a link and extends it to anything pictures video’s, ect. Whatever is popular gets moved up. There is also an option to randomly visit something randomly or stumble upon it as the name actually suggests.

This is a good start to your social networking and interactions, over time i will be adding more sites to the list as i come across them and find if they are a useful tool or not.

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