Platforms that offer online networking and online bookmarking have grown in popularity in the last five years. But it’s hard to know which free 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 may find vastly different assessments about their content. Some people would fight for their social media choices to the bitter end. 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 discovery. Some people defend their choice without even knowing the differences business networking, social bookmarking sites and social networking communities that are primarily there for fun. Even some avid social media users don’t know that there are also social networking platforms, like Yuwie, 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 social networks because the features and uses overlap. For example, Facebook can be used for business or pleasure. There are thousands upon thousands of user-driven free online social networking communities, such as Paper Craft Planet, which specialize in focused interests. These online social networking sites are important due to their emphasis on people’s niche interests. Communities focused on niches, such as book readers, abound. Social networks that feature book reviews, like Booksconnect, cater to bookworms everywhere. An innovative variant of online social networking is online social bookmarking, which has become very popular. Social bookmarking sites like Mister Wong 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 tagging is allowed The ability to use keyword tagging also is of value to Web marketers, who use them to garner backlinks for their blog posts and Web sites. A single social bookmarking link isn’t that valuable but when there are many of them, search traffic often increases. And with sites such as Mixx, if a URL is posted on one of these bookmarking sites that has good pagerank, top search engine rankings can be had for that page if it has good keyword tags and was submitted properly.

The boundaries are made even more murky with sites like Digg, which are set up for both 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. Many new business contacts and friends are just waiting to be found on these platforms and links posted to these online 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.