Social media in the form of social networking and online bookmarking have grown in popularity in the last five years. It can be hard, however, to know which to choose because there are so many of them. That’s where social media reviews come in. When reading these reviews, though, you may find that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Many folks fight for 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 all their time was taken up with one site before they knew what was happening. Some people fight for their choice without even knowing the differences between business networking sites, social bookmarking sites and social networking communities that are primarily there for fun. Many people don’t know that there also are free social networking sites, like Capazoo, that pay for people to use and promote them.

Many social media users aren’t aware of the variations between one form of free network and another because there is a lot of cross-over in the platforms. Sites such as Facebook can be used just for fun or for serious business networking, or both! And there are literally tens of thousands of Ning sites, such as Vintage Life Network, which specialize in narrow niches. These sites are really where the rubber hits the road when it comes to free social networking because they’re created by users and focus on distinct interests. Interests can be as specific as book aficionados, who now have many online communities geared just to them. Online social networking websites that feature book reviews, like LibraryThing, cater to bookworms everywhere. Another powerful form of online networking sites is social bookmarking, because it opens up new worlds of information storage and retrieval. Sites that feature social bookmarking, such as del.icio.us, allow logged-in users to save their online bookmarks for free. Social bookmarking sites also are a great help to Web searchers, because searches are greatly enhanced by keyword tagging. This ability also makes these sites tremendous for Internet marketers, because they can get backlinks for their Web properties. The individual links aren’t that valuable but when there are many of them, search traffic often increases. As with BloggingZoom, 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.

Confusing the issue even more are 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. 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. This makes these type of sites genuine gold to Internet marketers.