Social Networking sites have become extremely popular in recent times with sites such as, MySpace, Facebook and Bebo seeing huge success and with new sites starting up such as foom.com and okcupid.com, they look set to stay.

These sites basically allow members to create their own personal profiles about themselves and then add others from the sites community to their list of online friends.

There are two different types of social networking site; internal social networking (ISN) and external social networking (ESN). The most well known site such as MySpace and Facebook are all ESN sites.

An ISN is a closed or private community that are usually set up for a company, school or association. An ISN could even be an “invite only” group that has been especially created for the group by somebody from an ESN, which brings me nicely to what ESNs are.

ESNs are open or public and are therefore available to all members of the websites community and are usually set up and designed to attract advertisers. An ESN can still be a site that is more specialised for a certain group of people. Of course, they can also be very large and generic networking sites such as Facebook.

Regardless of all of these differences between the types of networking sites, they all basically work in the same way. They all allow users to put up pictures of themselves, create their own, personal profile about themselves and also add other users as friends.

Many of the sites now require users to accept friend requests that have been sent to them from other users to confirm that they do know each other. A lot also have privacy controls in place now as well so that you can choose how much of your profile is available for others to see.

There are many businesses that have realised the potential of social networking sites and want to create a vibrant and popular community in order to help promote their business in a very popular and creative way but unfortunately, few seem to pull this off. Below are a few tips that will hopefully hope make this happen:

Choosing your format

It is impossible for a social networking site to be a success if it doesn’t have a fun and simple page that is easy to navigate around. Some ideas that may help create this type of page is including photos and videos to make the page more colourful and insightful. Also, allowing your members to include their own videos, photos and questions will make them feel more involved and interested in your site. It can however, be very easy to overload your page with new and exciting ideas but this can have the opposite effect and make the page very difficult to navigate around. Try keeping is simple, with only a few additions that you update on a fairly regular basis.

Promote your network

It is difficult to get people to visit and join your community and many of the best and most successful have offered people incentives to join, bought advertising and started by sending emails to friends, colleagues and acquaintances to get the ball rolling. Also try promoting your businesses site on email signatures and in other places where people are likely to see it.

Update often

As I mentioned before, try to update your site as often as you can. Refresh your features often and don’t forget that the sites creator will no doubt have to spend a lot of their time at the beginning, including interesting content on the site and finding new tools and features that will appeal to users and make them want to join the community.

Make sure they want to visit again

How successful a community is, is usually determined by the repeat users to the page. This is, again, not the easiest of tasks, especially at the beginning. Offering the users RSS feeds and email newsletters that will update them of any new content and offers etc on your site will mean that they find out about new features as soon as they arrive. This should help increase the amount of visitors that you receive and also help encourage users to start discussions on your community, as well as them making “friends” and forming subgroups, hopefully boosting the odds that they will return and interact some more.