There are millions of users online everyday and statistics show that social media such as Myspace and Facebook attract a high proportion of these users. However, when it comes to social marketing, social bookmarking, or just plain socializing, bigger is not really better. Given the opportunity, would you prefer to try and socialize at a football stadium with 100,000 people, or at small gathering of 30 or 40 people, drinks and nibbles included.

Which is more important - social marketing or search engine marketing? My first response is why not both! Surely they are not exclusive - and they aren't. There are however times when you need to focus more on one area than the other. If you have a website that is competing in an area that has an lot of competition then search engine marketing may be a long term proposal. Social marketing on the other hand can be a short term option that produces better results.

If you spend any time on any of the social sites you will soon come to recognize the 'desperate' social marketing users. There are lot of them around too. The strange thing is, you don't need to be desperate to get results and you can get those results fairly quickly if your approach is sensible. Perhaps I should add sensitive - sensitive to the needs of others. What marks a user as a 'desperate' social marketing wanna be?

Whether you are launching a social networking site or just learning how to market your small five page informative site SEOmoz can help you with all aspects of your online marketing approach. If you are internet savvy and realize that search engine optimization is must to allow your e-commerce site to grow and prosper but you lack a bit of direction than SEOmoz can help you get on the right path.

A trend that is slowly growing is the self promotion of profiles on the various social networking and social bookmarking sites. In fact self promotion of any online activity. Take a look at some of the blogs around you. You will see in one of the sidebars a list that probably reads something like - 'Find Me On' with a list of links to all their online profiles. Is it a good idea. From my perspective it definitely is. If I come across your site,

Social networking can be a real winner if you know how to use it properly. There are however always going to be negatives if you are not careful and do not have some form of self control. some of these negative include: Productivity: Social networking can be counter productive at times. If you spread yourself too thinly by trying to communicate across more than network, you may find you are spending more time 'keeping up' and responding to others in your networks.

I converse frequently with several people in South Africa and these calls are important. With my being in the United States, it can be a bit costly. However last year I discovered a seemingly great site - www.SpeakPrePaid.com. I had bought a card roughly every week from them and was loyal to their site despite there being several other calling card sites that I could have purchased cards from. To date,

Humans are fickle and what attracts them today may not attract them tomorrow. There are however some things that will always be attractive if presented in the right manner. To gain traffic from social bookmarking sites is not always that difficult - we just have the wrong expectations. Many website owners, and more so bloggers, expect every page submitted to a social bookmarking site to suddenly get traffic. It's never going to happen.

A different marketing gimmick that is creeping into many businesses, particularly bricks and mortar businesses, is to establish a catchy URL, set up a page on Myspace, and have that URL redirect to the Myspace page. A slightly different twist to alternative domain names that all redirect to the one main domain. It's a clever marketing ploy, particularly for bricks and mortar businesses as a page on Myspace can be easier to establish than creating a web site from scratch.

Do you know what pitch is? You may think you do, but let me tell ya, it is not what you think. So what is pitch? They use it to seal asphalt. If you have ever watched a crew laying out pitch you probably noticed FIVE really, really, important things about pitch: Pitch is black. Pitch is really freakin hot. If you get too close to it, it sticks to you. If you do get it on you, it burns the hyde right off you. Like naplam. Once you get burned by pitch,

There is a new kid on the block when it comes to small business social networking and it comes packed with a lot of features. Sta.rtUP.Biz seems to offer a lot of opportunities along with a lot of help. Their forum is one of the features with free legal advice, free search engine optimization advice and even advice on getting finance and finding partners. There is a free business tools section and you can create your own page. There are also some helpful videos.

The online world is full of internal links - no wonder they call it the world wide web, perhaps it should be the world wild web. Social sites are looking to share profile data, users are seriously thinking about one stop login shops, blogs can link to various social blogging and social bookmarking sites and now, just to cap things of, EzineArticles - the article submission directory, is allowing users to include links to their social profiles in their author bio page.

If you are a little tired of the constant emails from Digg 'friends' asking you to 'digg' their content then lookout, Digg are now going to start recommending content. Called the 'Recommendation Engine', the Digg blog announced its release into, here's that word again, Beta and will be released to registered users first. The announcement also noted: The Recommendation Engine is a cool way to discover new content on Digg. Now that there are more than 16,

Many people, particularly bloggers, use data collected from areas such as Google Trends to find topics or keywords to inspire their next piece of content. Social blogging can provide the same type of information, in this case information that is probably more relevant to blogging. Social blogging sites such as Twitter can be real information gold mines. In fact twist, a site that shows what hot on Twitter has made it easier.

Everyone knows that a blog is a great way to provide information to customers and prospective customers. We live in a society that is using the online world to research products prior to purchasing - most of this research is done through search engines, however social networking is becoming an effective means to deliver information. If you can connect with both you will find your traffic and and sales improving.

Facebook has a feature that I find interesting, yet limited. Perhaps I have not got the hang of it. The MiniFeeds are handy to grab feeds from your blog, del.icio.us, digg and SU accounts )there are others(. I have not been able to work out how to get the feed from more than one blog into my account. It seems it has a limitation in that respect. What is interesting is the introduction of comments on these MiniFeeds.

Social blogging through micro sites such as Twitter has become so popular that the sites themselves are struggling to cope with traffic. With the inclusion of plugins such as those available for WordPress, people can keep up to date with every singe action of their friends. Conversations now get quite personal with every aspects of life covered. I am sure some people tweet while eating,

Social Marketing comes in many shapes and sizes. I believe we have only scratched the surface of its potential through websites like Facebook and MySpace. Proper web design plays a big role. If you are planning any social marketing related it is important to have a site that looks like it was built by a professional otherwise you will hit a major roadblock with web traffic.

Problogger ran an interesting post recently discussing the concept of promoting other peoples posts as a round about way to increase your own traffic. It brings social bookmarking to a new and interesting level. The concept is quite simple and clever. In brief, the object is to review other bloggers who have written post that link to yours. If the post is of a good quality then you should promote it through Digg, or StumbleUpon or any of the other social bookmarking sites.

Blog comments are your best resource, both on your blog and when you leave comments other blogs and here's why. Blog comments on your blog allow you to get feed back from your readers, both good and bad. Your buyers will post favorable mini testimonials that you use in emails, salesletters and in blubs in blog posts. Better yet you receive OBJECTIONS and "This cannot possibly work" type comments. And get this, they are your best resource. Yeah, the ones that do not buy.