Social Media Sites, How Can You Benefit

By Author: Lynda Melbal
Total Articles: 1124
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Social media sites have become the latest craze on the Internet. Social Marketing can also be seen as the next wave of internet marketing. Everyone has heard about social sites and benefits from such sites. Social sites provide a lot of freedom and interactivity to the user. Such sites are powered by the latest technologies like AJAX and allow users to personalize page backgrounds,style,post their music, post videos, store documents, share their favorites and connect with people. Users can also post their pictures, share them with friends and even invite or search for new friends.

But how exactly do these sites help your site and its rankings? By sending huge amounts of traffic and getting you a good ranking on search engines.

There are two types of social sites. One is social networking and the other type is social bookmarking. Social networking sites provide you an easy way to connect with people who share similar interests like you. Sites like MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster are popular among users. These sites have a huge user base and provide an excellent opportunity for advertising your site. ...
... There are also specialized social networking sites like 43Things, MomJunction, Mothersclick which cater to specific interests.

Some social networking sites group people with common interests, but some sites are "traditional networking sites" and allow you to search for friends based on your interests. In any case you will always have a larger audience for showcasing your site. Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to post your advertisements and promote your products, provided you are not spamming. If you have a really good site, you will surely find a large visitor base just by showcasing your site on your profile.

Social bookmarking sites provide you easy way to store, organize, manage your bookmarks as well as share them with your friends. You can bookmark any URL or page you liked and even mark them for public or private viewing. Social bookmarking sites also provide you with the option of tagging your bookmarks. Some of the bookmarking sites link directly to your URL's thus helping your site in getting valuable back links and quick indexing. Sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious are known to send huge traffic to your site. If you manage to get on the front page of these sites, you should be prepared to handle a huge number of visitors to your site.

Search engines spiders love social sites and usually follow links on these sites. This means if you have your site link on social networking and bookmarking sites, your site will be indexed quickly.

If you happen to be using Wordpress for your blog, you should use some good plugins like Socialmarker, Socializer and Addthis. These plugins provide your site visitors a quick option to bookmark your site. Getting bookmarked from different users and different bookmarking sites will definitely help your site rank better on search engines. Some plugins like Onlywire automatically bookmark your post to 20 different bookmarking sites as soon as you publish your post.

It is a known fact that the video and photo sharing sites like Youtube and Flickr are visited by millions of people everyday. If you think out of the box and use your creativity, your published video will get your site the traffic you've always wanted. Some video sharing sites like Metacafe also pay you a part of their revenue just for publishing your video.

Like it or not, social sites have become an integral part of the internet. You need to use this opportunity to you advantage before it is too late.