Social Networking Sites Explained

What exactly are Social Networking Sites?

There is a lot of talk lately about social networking websites and their value for Internet marketing and online business. There is also a lot of talk from social network sites who can’t really keep up with spam attacks, so what’s the fuzz all about?

Social networking sites are websites like MySpace and FaceBook to name the most recognized. In total there are more than 2′000 social networks out there. To publish a comprehensive list of social networks would already take weeks. And now literally every day this number grows. Social Networking sites are community websites where everyone can join in for free, add personal information, blogs, gadgets and, most important to Internet marketers, links to one’s own work. Honestly, we are all writing our stuff for someone to read and not only to pass our time. what better place could there be than social networking sites with millions of users, grouped into networks of interest and location. Social networking websites are the best places to find not only mind-like people but also very targeted traffic to whatever you offer on your blog or website.

The Biggest Social Network Websites Today

By today, MySpace, the largest free social network on the Internet, counts for about a third amount of traffic as Google with FaceBook catching up fast, already having more traffic than MySpace in April 2008. But lets have a look at some serious statistics at this point.

1. MySpace has reached 30% of the amount of traffic Google got in the same time. And the numbers are rock solid. 300′000 people out of 1 million visit google.com that means that every third visited page is a google page and according to these numbers, every 8th visit on the web goes to MySpace! Well that is a lot of people hanging out there and that is a lot of potential traffic to your website or blog by participating on just this social networking site. But there is more to come.

2. FaceBook has picked up the pace in April 2008 and in my humble opinion FaceBook has written history here. For the first time in the rather short life of social networking websites, FaceBook has overtaken MySpace. as you can see in the example at the left side. Things are moving fast and social networking sites are growing by the day. New networks pop up almost every week. Where it stops; nobody knows.

3. Yuwie, another free social network is the very best example in how a social networking site still can be very successful even though the competition seems to be overwhelming at the first glimpse, but look at this; Yuwie gets more than 1′800 new members per day. They have only launched their site in September 2007 but reached the rank of slashdot.org, one of the oldest social networking websites, within a single month! May that has something to do with the fact that Yuwie actually pays their members for surfing around their network. A rather interesting approach and very unique. It sure is worth checking out.

As i mentioned in the beginning, there are more than two thousand social networking websites up and running at the moment. A social network software is rather expensive to buy but if you are up for the challenge, here is a free open source social network software where you can create your own social network website online. It is actually more of a social networking portal but with a very good backbone. I went to Ning, just to show you an example, and created my own social network within one hour. I’m still the only member i guess but you can change that by clicking on this nice Ning button and join my new social network site.

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How do Social Networking Websites Help Your Business To Grow?

That’s a lot easier than you might think and the results off your efforts are almost immediately visible. You should become member of at least some of the bigger networking sites and you should bookmark your work on these websites. Social Bookmarking is mostly done by the click of a button and adding some tags and a description of the page to bookmark. Now, doing this to all 2′000 social networking sites isn’t very realistic, but by adding a simple button code like this one to your posts and pages you can save yourself some time and additionally give your readers the chance to bookmark your article to their favored network sites by one click.

Now here is an idea how you can save yourself a lot of time buy bookmarking your articles to 20 or so large social networking websites at once. OlnyWire offers you a two click solution by simply dragging a little button onto your browser window. It might take you a couple of hours to setup all the accounts but you only need to do this once and it gives your website or blog a tremendous additional exposure.

List of Links to more information about Social Networking:

• Social Network List on Wikkipedia
• Social Network Meta List