I recieved a newsletter from The Center of Media Research this morning, and thought I'd share some of the stats that they have recieved from Nielson Online.  It proves that soial media is definately a force to be reckoned with, and the continued growth in this sector has been phenominal, and makes you start to think that SMO (social media optimisation) is here to stay. 

Although it is true that sites like MySpace have taken away Page Rank and text link use from their profile pages, which doesn't help you with your SEO strategies, but if you look at the number of unique visitors these sites are generating per month, there is a lot of potential for traffic growth, not to mention showing your customers/client base that you are keeping up with the times.  We already know that creating company profiles on social networking sites is a great way to make your business personable, and that blogging is fantastic tool to help with your rankings and opens up a forum type of discussion with your customers - so why aren't more companies taking part?

Have a look at the findings below and inparticular the % of growth that some of these sites are obtaining:

I would strongly urge all businesses to have a look at the traffic of these sites and take that into consideration, for example if you create a profile on MySpace, which is recieving 58,843,000 unique visitors (as of Oct. 2007), and you manage to be seen by just one tenth of one percent of that traffic, that equates to 58,843 views, which may seem some what unrealistic, but there is no harm in trying! 

One thing to keep in mind with all this though, social media networks are just that, networks.  You can't just create a profile and let it stay static.  To get the best result, you need to join groups, add friends and share with the community - either through comments or blogs. 

Not only can social media networks drive traffic to your site, they are actually fun to watch grow!  Especially when the friend requests start rolling in!