Many are using the professional social networking site LinkedIn. General social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are also increasingly popular, but surprisingly the micro-blogging services (such as Twitter), forums, wikis and social bookmarking applications are less popular.

In Australia, I would imagine the figures would be even less. But social networks, micro blogging and social bookmarking can have two positive effects for SME’s.

Increase Direct Traffic

You can directly increase your website traffic through using tools such as Twitter. Techcrunch a digital newsletter recently posted their traffic results, stating  “Over the past few months, TechCrunch has experienced the power of this micro-media firsthand as the percentage of traffic we get from Twitter has grown to the point that it is now our second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits.”

Improve Page Rankings and SEO Results

Most Search Engine Optimisation Companies will tell you that off page SEO is probably more important to results than on page SEO. This is generally achieved by having high value page rank sites linking to your website. Well guess what! sites like Twitter, Digg, Stumble Upon and the rest rank well with Google and generating links to your site from these is pretty easy. This is why most websites these days are using social bookmarking icons frequently (like the ones below this post) to make it easy to add these bookmarks so they can have more authority sites linking to their website increasing their page rank.

Free Traffic

Having your website visitors bookmark your site can add traffic and increase page rank in search engines. There is no excuse for all Australian SME’s not to be using this technique.