What started out as a fun way to meet new people, find interesting things, and share facts with others, has now turned into one of the most sought after business tools for companies looking to explored online business opportunities as well as marketers tryng to find their audience.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Mixx, Myspace, and many others have all started becoming business tools over the past year or so as many Internet veterans are seeing an emerging force in the social realm to drive specific traffic to pages that are relevant to the audience. Using these sites, many businesses have found a larger audience to share with company related news with, increase their networking contacts, and gained new business from the audience that is active on these sites.

With so many sites, and so little time, where does one begin and how do businesses start their own social marketing from these popular social networking sites.  The following will outline some of the popular social sites, how to use them, as well as a little bit on what to know about social marketing.

1. Facebook - By far one of the biggest on the web and from last count, was about to surpass Myspace as the largest online social community. There are many things that businesses can do here to interact with the audience. In addition, Facebook has their own internal search so start by doing a search for keyword that you would like to rank for. Looking at what comes up will help to determine where to start. In many cases, a Facebook group or page would be the first links show in the search results. This means that it is important for business to create a page for their company, as well as a page for any products or services that the company offers. Pages can be promoted like sales tools and Facebook has a PPC program to promote pages and get more exposure for them. This is where Facebook recommends businesses to put their commercial content. On the other hand, if a business want to interact with the audience and let them share in on the fun, than create a group and start discussion. This is a great way for people to interact with companies and businesses that engage their audience will often have more conversations going on and more feedback from customers.
   
2. Twitter - Growing so fast that many have just got on there just to be there, but most businesses are not sure what to do with it. The best thing to do is setup a keyword alerts for things like products or services offered by the company, brand terms, or negative keywords that could effect sales. Businesses can use these to find out when people are talking about them, their product or service, a competitor, or even some industry related news. In addition, there are services that allow for companies to set up auto-messages to be dropped in the time-line even if a person is not present to do so. This keep business's streams live and active. There are a host of other services and tools that people can use to get the most out of Twitter and for those that want more, than go to a site like TweetLater.com and see what they have available for free.
   
3. Digg - A great book-marking site that gets a lot of SEO value. These pages can rank really high on search engines so it's a good idea to submit stories to this site. A story that gets dugg a lot not only will bring direct traffic, but will also get ranked high on engines and will continually bring in some visitors. The key here is to grow a contact list and submit good stories. The diggs will grow as well as the followers.
   
4. Myspace - Quickly becoming extinct but still #2 on the social community world. However, this tends to be a younger audience as they allow for pages to be customized, which is what most younger Internet surfers like to do. There are a lot of similarities between Facebook and Myspace, but the best thing to do is determine your audience and see which one makes more sense to spend time with. If you are selling supplemental insurance, than maybe Facebook is the better way to go, but if you are selling kids shoes, than maybe Myspace is the better way to go. Either way, companies should have a presence on both, but try to focus on the one that brings in more business.
   
5. Mixx - A really good and active community. This site is like combing the best of Facebook, Digg, and Twitter altogether. The reason is that on the surface it's a social community with groups, polls, friend interaction, email and other social services that are found in Facebook. However, it also has a huge book-marking section that ranks pretty good on engines, similar to what Digg does. In addition, it has a time line feature and current status updater like Twitter. This one site can do it all and is growing pretty big. All of the things mentioned above can be done on this site and businesses should take notice of it.

This isn't a social site, but I've got to mention Ping.fm here as well. This is a great social tool and not a social site, but it allows people to update most of the social networks on the web with just one user account. Going to Ping.fm, a person would just sign up for a new account, and then they can select any of the social networks they handle and then put in their user name and password for that social network. Once entered, Ping.fm can now update the status or micro-blogging outlet whenever a new ping is sent. Pings can be updated from their site, a browser toolbar, or even a blog RSS fee. It's a great site that makes socializing a lot of easier and more consistent.