Micro-blogging (or microblogging) is a type of blogging that restricts posts to a shorter length. It typically also offers more community features as well, such as a timeline of your friends’ posts and the ability to tag friends in your post. Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging service.

Why are micro-blogging services relevant? In this fast-paced world, micro-blogging gives friends and colleagues a way to keep in touch with each other and industry news. Twitter launched in July of 2006 but didn’t gain widespread popularity until the SXSW Conference in March of 2007, where it was used extensively as a way to keep up with panels, keynotes and parties.

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There are hundreds, maybe thousands of social networking sites. For those of you who don’t understand exactly what a social network is, here is a simple, non-technical explanation:

Social Networks are networks that people create by linking to people they know, who link to people they know, etc.

What does this mean? Well, have you heard of Facebook? MySpace? YouTube? Digg? All of these websites are built on the concept of social networks. People publish content, and link to all their “friends” who also publish content. This content might be a personal blog or profile, photos of themselves, a video or links they find interesting.

This is the basis behind the Web 2.0 revolution.

What makes social networks so powerful? A few reasons:

• Users post the content
• Users link to their friends and bring traffic to the website
• People tend to believe their friends
• They can grow rapidly and virally

There is no doubt that social networks are powerful. How can you harness that power to build a business? Lots of people have tried to monetize social networking… I’m not talking about the website owners, I’m talking about members. Most of them have gone about it the wrong way, spamming members and getting banned from social networking websites forever.

This blog is all about the right ways to effectively market on social networking websites, and harness their power to make money.

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