Many businesses, websites, and individuals turn to social media optimization because it can be used to benefit their businesses or websites through marketing, brand building, and reputation management.

Unfortunately, the nature of social media and social networking websites is such that they can quickly take up all of your time logging in and checking and answering messages.

If you set up a Facebook account or a LinkedIn profile to help you bury negative search results then getting embroiled in lengthy conversations and looking up old school friends won’t help.

Online marketing and Internet reputation management are not mutually exclusive and indeed the act of creating and promoting your own web pages so that they perform well in search results could be considered a practice to benefit both.

Look for social sites that enable you to create a profile and then check back occasionally to see how things are going. It’s possible that a potential lead has made contact especially on some of the better networking sites for professionals but if you become a regular user of Twitter and MySpace then you won’t have much time left for running your business.

There are many types of social website. Social networking sites allow you to create a profile and then reach out and connect with others. Bookmarking sites provide a convenient means to bookmark your favourite pages and even make them public. Social media websites allow you to share videos, photos, and other forms of media.

Using a combination of these sites can help you improve your reputation and drive high quality traffic.