Online social media encompasses a variety of heavily interactive web sites, including MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, Twitter, and many others. More conventional systems like newsgroups and message boards are also part of social media. If you’re interested in getting involved in this type of media for marketing and/or SEO purposes, where should you start?

To some extent, the best place to start depends upon your skills. To effectively use social media for marketing, you should also be able to contribute useful or interesting material that grabs the reader’s attention. If you’re good at photography and own a digital camera or scanner, try using Flickr. People who are proficient at research and editing might get involved in Wikipedia, while someone with good writing skills may prefer posting on forums or making linked blog comments.

So what are some of the best social media sites to start with? For social bookmarking, Reddit.com has a very quick registration process and it’s generally easier to get your links noticed there (compared to Digg and Delicious). Although not often recognized as such, Yahoo! Groups may also be one of the best social media sites; it allows anyone with a Yahoo account to easily join and create groups where members can send out messages, respond to polls, upload files, and more.

Sometimes the best way to approach social media is to start your own web site; a subject-specific wiki, a “micro blog”, a photo collection, etc. This way, you will be able to gain advertising revenue and have more control over the format. However, successfully starting your own forum, video, or bookmarking site would be more difficult. Having your own site is better if you intend to earn money from your content, using someone else’s site is desirable if you want to benefit from links.

Overall, the right social media sites to start with depend upon your specific abilities and goals.

Using social media for advertising purposes can be of benefit, but it is more likely to prove effective if excessively promotional techniques are avoided. Social media web sites include such services as YouTube, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, and MySpace. Here are some more details on using particular types of social media to your benefit.

VIDEO SHARING: Web sites like YouTube are often used to promote other sites, usually by displaying the site’s address at the bottom of a video or at the end of it. They can also benefit efforts to market a particular product by showing it in action. A few marketers use YouTube to host openly promotional videos linked from their sites as well, thus reducing bandwidth costs. A drawback to using this method is that it is somewhat time-consuming and requires audio/video recording equipment, along with relatively recent computer hardware.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Using the “External Links” or “References” sections of social media online encyclopedias (like Wikipedia) to add a link to your web site is another way of using social media to benefit your promotional efforts. You can also add a new encyclopedia page about your company or product, but biased information should be avoided; it will also have to be periodically monitored to see if others make unfavorable changes. For the best effect, efforts aimed at using this type of social media to your benefit should be carried out in the context of making a positive, useful contribution to the system.

NETWORKING: Some companies create a profile at one or more social networking systems (especially MySpace) to promote their businesses. However, automated or bulk promotional methods should be avoided on social networking sites; this can result in account deletion, or (in severe cases) legal action. MySpace also has a job search feature, which businesses can use to benefit their employee-finding efforts. To list a job on it, follow instructions provided on the “Submit Feed” page at simplyhired.com.

BOOKMARKING: Using social bookmarking services for your promotional efforts is another option, including sites such as Sphinn, Furl, and Digg. It is more effective to submit your site’s recent informational or entertaining pages, rather than pages which are specifically designed to sell a product or service. It’s also to your benefit to submit links from other interesting web sites, and to avoid posting links from the same site excessively, to prevent being labeled a “spammer”. This technique requires less effort than using the above-mentioned methods.

Social networking websites are basically a large set of customized user profiles which people can post messages to, combined with forums, and photo or video sharing. Some of the most popular social networking websites include MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster. Read on for a comparison of a few of the major websites of this type…

MYSPACE: Perhaps the most well-known of the social networking websites, MySpace has a Yahoo-like home page with featured information and a search engine. Alexa.com ranks it as the sixth most popular website on the internet. It has a slightly longer registration form than Facebook, with nine questions, but it is relatively short compared to the sign-up forms for some free e-mail service websites. Membership includes a free e-mail account, but another confirmed e-mail account is required to sign up. Users must be at least fourteen years of age.

FACEBOOK: The social networking website Facebook has a somewhat more sparse design. It appears to have less advertising and graphics than MySpace, at least in the areas which don’t require membership. The registration form is short, with only five questions. Like MySpace, it requests a valid e-mail address to sign up. Users are required to either be 13-17 years of age and in high school or college, or at least eighteen years old. This excludes those who have dropped out of high school or completed it before the age of eighteen and are not attending college.

FRIENDSTER: Another one of the most popular social networking websites, Friendster has a home page somewhat like that of MySpace, although it has slightly less advertising and loads a bit quicker. It uses a slightly longer registration form than the others, with eleven questions, and has a somewhat higher minimum age of sixteen.

According to a recent news story which appeared on the BBC News website (news.bbc.co.uk), people in different social classes tend to use particular social networking websites. For example, wealthier people and those attending college or university more commonly use Facebook, while more MySpace users start work after high school.

Many other, mostly smaller, social networking websites exist, including some which are targeted to more specific groups of people. Potentially preferable alternatives to social networking websites which offer some of the same benefits to more specific audiences include online group websites (like groups.yahoo.com), more traditional website message boards, and web-based or IRC internet “chat room” services.

At a Starbucks in downtown Mountain View, Calif., two 30-something men anxiously await the arrival of Reid Hoffman, one of Silicon Valley’s most sought-after angel investors. It’s 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon, the day Hoffman fields pitches from entrepreneurs.

The coffeehouse is brimming inside and out with laptops jockeyed by students and startup specialists. Hoffman arrives, his cell phone clasped to one ear as he walks toward the table dressed in Birkenstock sandals, khaki shorts, and a black polo shirt with the word “In” embroidered on the chest.

That’s “In” as in LinkedIn, the company that Hoffman co-founded and that he runs the other six days of the week.

LinkedIn is a three-year-old service that takes your personal business network online. People don’t use it to discover new bands or track down a date – there’s nothing social about this network.

LinkedIn is all about business: recruiting, sales, investment. It’s not exactly a marketplace or a job site but rather a community of more than 8 million people who rely on one another to get things done.

And not just any 8 million people, but leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, along with tens of thousands of employees from Google (Charts), Microsoft (Charts), and other tech giants that use LinkedIn to find the best and brightest workers.

“For many, it’s become irresponsible to not invite business associates into your LinkedIn network,” says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in sociology and strategy. “When that kind of cultural inflection point occurs, which is what LinkedIn is going through now, that is when things really begin to take off.”

Read Complete Article at CNN Money