Social networking is massively popular so much so that many companies have had to block people from using them during work hours simply because far to many business hours were being used by employees on personal social networking sites.Social networking allows interaction with friends, family and co workers and other users. It allows you to not only contact people you know now but you can find people you knew from the past and you can find people you don’t yet know who have similar likes and interests to you.You can interact in a variety of ways from sharing video, Audio playing games, chat etc. So this means you can use it for social and or business networking. It is always a good idea to have one account for personal use and one account for business networking, that way you don’t annoy your social friends with constant business updates and you don’t affect your business with social issues.In simple terms social networks are online communities where you can share information and meet people and works on users sharing content like pictures videos and so on and posting messages and playing games. Social networking sites are very very high traffic sites as an example ‘Facebook’ has over eight billion users at present and generates hundreds of millions of page impressions every day, that’s a lot of page impressions!So what does that to you as a business owner, well it means there are a lot of people on there looking for content, looking for information and yours could be the information they are after so social marketing should be an important part of your online business. Although social networking has really always been there since the start of the internet, now with new technologies and broadband connections and much faster computer processors it has taken off like crazy and is relatively easy for people of all ages with no technical experience to use. For example now you easily upload holiday photos or even videos with just two clicks. This means that it can be a very low cost way for people to connect and network with others so on a business level this is why you absolutely must be using it.As well as getting new potential customers you have the potential to meet new partners, new copy writers, JV partners, product developers and designers and you can connect with them easily and this can be useful for outsourcing the parts of your business that you don’t like to do yourself. You can share your new products, market and much more the possibilities are endless.As well as the well know general social sites like ‘MySpace’ and ‘Facebook’ there are a number of niche networking sites dedicated to members with a particular interest for exampleRyze.com is purely business networking, Ning.com is a good place to create your own social network very easily but that is a whole new topic I go into in another set of articles.In summary when used correctly any social networking site can be used to generate floods of traffic for your business or offers whatever they may be.