Social marketing can be a full time job all in itself. With new networks popping up almost daily it seems, how do you know where to begin, or what networks are the most important?

In our experience with our own business as well as those of our clients, these are the most productive social media web sites that a business owner can belong to:

1. Twitter - An absolute must for the business owner trying to gain targeted traffic to his or her web site. I wrote a more detailed article about how to take Twitter a few steps further in conjunction with your blog a few weeks back.

2. Facebook - Still one of the most visited web sites on the internet, and it's not really showing any signs of going away anytime soon. Facebook has become a phenomenon within circles of friends, with many people sharing entire relationships solely on Facebook.

3. Digg - Digg can be sort of like the lottery. It can be difficult to get an article Dugg hundreds or thousands of times, but if it does? Look out!

4. Identi.ca - What, you say? Yes. Identi.ca is a lesser known open source version of Twitter, but the bonus is: links on Identi.ca tend to hold some weight as backlinks.

5. LinkedIn - LinkedIn is *the* social network for business professionals. You can showcase your knowledge there with Answers, you can connect with other businesses and potential customers and you can recommend other products and services in your network.

If you don't have a lot of time to manage 99 Social Networks, at least make sure you're on these!

If you still don't have time for these, many Seo companies offer social marketing management services, freeing up your time to run your business. These Services can be quite time consuming for business owners, and often having someone else handle your social marketing is necessary.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, marketing, social media, social networks, twitter, facebook, linkedin, digg, identi.ca

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