Facebook was once a site that was only open to college students. It is still most popular amongst young professionals, college students, and high school students. However, the older generations are increasingly using the site to stay in contact with children and grandchildren, according to recent surveys.

However, those who are 55 and older are also the most concerned about privacy controls. Over 16.5 million people over the age of 55 use social networking sites, with Facebook being the most popular, but those people still have major concerns about identity theft, viruses, etc.

These people are probably the least likely to hurt their own reputations online and, consequently, need online reputation management help.

Twitter has brought the term microblogging to the fore of virtually every online marketer’s mind. It has particular benefit to online reputation management services because microblogging can be a quick and simple but highly effective way to post regular updates on the Internet. What’s more, sites like Twitter and Posterous can be combined so that updates on one site show on others. You can even integrate them into social networks like Facebook for potentially even greater exposure.

Twitter may be the benchmark by which all microblogging platforms are measured but there are a great many other similar websites as well as some that really break the mould.

One example of a microblogging site that attempts to do things a little differently is 12seconds.tv – rather than enabling users to post limited textual posts, it instead poses the challenge of posting short 12 second video blogs. Anybody that has attempted to condense useful information into short snippets will now just how difficult this can prove to be. It can also be integrated into other networks giving you a great way to show off video on otherwise text based networks.

There’s literally thousands of social networking and social media websites and not only would it prove fruitless to join them all, as you wouldn’t have time to post regular, high quality posts to them, but it would also be impossible because there are so many. Choosing those sites with platforms that interest you the most and offer the greatest benefits is a good way to ensure that you enjoy the greatest benefits of the sites.

The third annual Online Measurement and Strategy Report has been published and it shows that, surprise surprise, online reputation monitoring is the fastest growing analytic niche over the last year. Over the last year many people, and companies, have begun to realize exactly how important online reputation management really is.

There are several useful graphs in the report. Probably the single most interesting is the one that shows that a plurality of companies still don’t measure online reputation management. However, that plurality of 27% is far from a minority, meaning 63% do use some form of online reputation monitoring. Industry experts expect that number to continue to rise.