The latest buzzword rolling through the internet is “social media”. Closely tied to this term are sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Wordpress – the list keeps growing.

Facebook is now #3 on the top of the internet heap, and growing daily. I refer to these mega sites – Facebook and Twitter as “internet black holes”.

They have garnered unto themselves a huge amount of traffic and end user involvement, to such an extent that they cannot be ignored.

The downside to tying your horse to these sites as part of your marketing strategy is that you have to play by their rules.

The tendency is to allow your focus to revolve around them, and they tend to lessen the importance of having your own website. Don’t abandon the thought and the need to keep your own site(s) relevant.

A few years ago, MySpace was the top of the heap. Now, nobody cares about MySpace. Their only advantage is their proprietary music player, which allows musicians to showcase their work.

It will only be a matter of time before Facebook becomes a has-been, and people will gravitate towards “the next thing”.

All the more reason you should have your own site(s) up. All the more reason you should be growing your own following to your own site(s).

If you’re going to invest time into Facebook, such as a fan page, Facebook advertising and such, make sure the paths back to your own site are well placed. Give people a reason to come to your site beyond getting everything about you from Facebook.  Everything you do on Facebook should lead people back to your stuff, your site(s). Something could happen overnite that will cause people to leave Facebook in droves – it’s only a matter of time.

The same for MySpace, Twitter and any of the other “social media” websites out there. If you setup an account on these sites, make sure you have links back to your sites. If they don’ let you link back, then avoid using their site.

Also, there are plugins for your blog that allow your blog to publish automatically to Twitter, wordpress and Facebook sites.

Imagine saving time by writing your article once on your own website, and then automatically twitter ing it, facebooking it and sumultaneously publish it by RSS feed to other websites.

That fact alone is one of the reasons I use Wordpress as a content management system for websites.

Twitter and search -

Personally, I could care less about Twitter. I don’t twitter. But my websites do. And guess who reads my tweets? Not my friends – my friends don’t care about Twitter either. I don’t read their tweets.

However, someone – rather “some thing”  bigger is reading those tweets – and that’s the search engines. The big search providers have all started gearing their search engines to include Tweets. And guess what that does – the tweets add immediate lift to the site’s search engine rankings, and drive real traffic to sites. The results are nothing short of phenominal!