Facebook is more popular in the Uk and worldwide, Facebook and Myspace are now fairly equal when it comes to monthly unique visitors - interestingly, Myspace is still the more popular in the US. Myspace seems to be a little more socially inclusive. You can make friends with anyone and everyone is doing it. Facebook on the other hand is more old school - English old school at that. The Europeans tend to more a little more guarded and prefer the close not community of friends,

Yesterday I asked if social bookmarking was screwed and a couple of comments confirmed my views on the subject. One comment left a link to a post on Shoemoney's blog that really does prove my point. The post, Why I Won't F'in Digg or Stumble That Page For You , written anonymously, made several good points. They also inadvertently proved my point that social bookmarking is at skewed, if not screwed.

The internet is growing at an astounding rate and if you take blogs as a prime example, they are growing by the tens of thousands daily. With the increases in the numbers of bloggers, the number of pages being bookmarked each day is incredible, forget the tens of thousands, try the hundreds of thousands.

Social marketing can be a powerful tool used in the right hands. However, if you misuse the system you could be in for some serious consequences - and those consequences could have a profound long term effect, as some have discovered. There are two social marketing sins that can not only ruin your online image, they can potentially ruin you business - if not your business, your own career. Social Marketing Sin #1: Never misrepresent who you are!

If your business 'professional' then you will know all about plans: business plans, marketing plans, cash flow plans )also called budgets but still plans(, so do you also have a social marketing plan? Most website owners do not! They do not see the purpose of planning their social marketing campaigns, after all, it's social and that is ad-hoc. Well it is isn't it? The answer is no, it is not ad-hoc. Quite the opposite.

Over time, you will come across new social sites that appeal to you and you will start to use them more than some of the others, particularly if you feel you have gained as much as you are ever going to gain from them. This can be particularly true of bloggers who hit the 9-12 month period in their blogging life. Website owners can also find themselves in this position. Most people, when they first start using social sites, abuse them more than use them.

Social media marketing is fast approaching us and before you know it this concept will hit blog status in levels of popularity and controversy. We have only scratched the surface of social media marketing and as time moves forward the demand for employees that know what they are doing will grow as well. emarketingSilo can help you find the right social media marketing guru to help your organization grow.

YouTube is now experimenting with videos longer than 10 minutes )current limit( and extending the storage capacity to 1GB - this equates to around 80 minutes of standard definition video. It's limited to YouTube's "content partners" at present but has the potential big to explode into far greater things.

One of the interesting aspects of social marketing and social bookmarking is that each of the different social bookmarking sites has a particular angle. If you take Digg and Fark as two completely different sites, one, Fark, is more likely to deliver traffic if your headline is catchy and somewhat humorous. Digg on the other hand is more likely to deliver traffic if the headline is more technical.

Curiosity and suspense have long been a tool of choice by advertising and marketing gurus in the bricks and mortar world and that philosophy is many now be creeping into the online marketing and social marketing fields. It is not a bad ploy when it works and can lead to a strong viral marketing campaign. An article on Small Business Newz titled Curiosity Got the Customer describes an offline - online curiosity campaign that went viral in a big way.

Your profile is the starting point for your presence on Facebook, in fact, it is the window that allows others to look into you and your products. Your profile page is your landing page - the first thing that visitors see is that landing page so it needs to be optimized to sell you. The profile page is one of the few areas you can control in Facebook. You control the design and the information that is contained. You can reveal as much or as little as you see fit.

Social networking will never be the same. Debrett's, the well known authority on etiquette have weighed in with their version of social networking etiquette . After research showed that a majority of users had no idea about what was accepted in social networking circles, Debret's developed their version of social networking etiquette. Here are their rules: You don't have to make friends with people you don't know.

YouTube offers provides an opportunity for businesses to upload videos on a wide range of subject matter. Now that YouTube is becoming available on many TV sets the opportunity exists to get your message out onto a much bigger screen and to a much wider audience. Video's in the 'how to' format may become popular and what better way is there to promote your brand and your expertise, all virtually at no cost. The only cost would be the production of the short videos.

Social networking, or just plain socializing, has become the 'in' thing with thousands flocking to Twitter or Plurk each day. Facebook and Myspace continue to grow along with hundreds of other similar sites. One comment I hear on many of these sites goes along the lines of, "I had better stop wasting my time here and get back to work". You must wonder what their employers would think if they new how much time was spent on these activities.

The Friday Traffic Report has an interesting post on what are the Top 10 Social Sites By Alexa Rankings . Alexa is not the most reliable of ranking services although in this case, they may be fairly close. Social networkers appear to use the Alexa Toolbar in greater numbers than non social networkers. What is probably more remarkable are the sites that are missing from the list.

Social networking has been going crazy over the last two or so years and the main emphasis has been on either providing value for others or self promotion. There are few who can really use these sites to create win win situations. We all know the win win scenario - you gain something and I gain something. Every bodies happy. With social networking, the idea is to engage with others to gain a network of people who are all interested in similar ideas or products.

One of the most important relationships between a website and a visitor, particularly a customer, is the websites reputation. When it comes to seeking help or seeking advice, a website or webmaster needs to be able to demonstrate an expertize, to be considered an authority on the topic. Social content is one to establish that reputation. Everything you say or do on any of the social sites is, to all intents and purposes, permanent and there for the world to see.

A common theme on many social marketing site is that only way to succeed on social networking and social bookmarking sites is by being social; in other words socializing. That then raises the question, 'what does it mean to socialize?'. The more I thought on that question the more I came to realize that a humble post such as this cannot answer that question. There are literally thousands of social networking or social bookmarking sites spread across the internet.

The benefits of social marketing for a business can be huge, however it must be used in the most efficient way possible. Social marketing allows a business to gain popularity by using the different types of social media available, such as blogs, video and photo sharing sites, social networking sites and social bookmarking websites. The top 5 benefits are: Increased visibility Social marketing has the ability to to spread information.

Yahoo! Search Gallery has opened for business and together with Search Monkey offer a new way to find contacts to build your social networks. Where Google is dictating what you see in the search results, Yahoo! is allowing users to customize their search results. Search Monkey allows developers to write applications that help refine a users search results. So far there are 39 applications on Yahoo! Search Gallery ,