The social media networks have truly invigorated life online for both business and personal use. Internet users have predominantly jumped on the bandwagon when it comes to keeping up with friends online. A lot of life's social activity can now be found encoded in the data streams of sites like Facebook and Twitter. This is great news for the average online business.

Social media sites form the basis for most companies' online reputation management plans. These sites are incredibly useful to any business that is interested in monitoring its online reputation. Not only do they attract a broad cross-section of internet users, they attract a constant stream of new information. This means that any company monitoring these sites has access to a regular sampling of general data about their business reputation.

There are many reasons to include social media sites in your internet reputation management plan. The top sites for monitoring reputation in the social media are: *Facebook: Everyone and their mother is on Facebook these days, which makes it a prime place to tap into buzz.

*Twitter: This site has a high PageRank, and its pages often appear in general Google listings. It's also incredibly popular, which means that any campaign you mount will net a lot of attention. Users of this site post several times a day, so Twitter monitoring has to be undertaken at least daily.

*LinkedIn: This site has crept up in popularity in the last year or so. Although there is an emphasis on networking rather than socializing, businesses can still use the site to monitor the zeitgeist.

*Yelp: This review site is worth tapping into occasionally in case of negative reviews. Check the regional popularity of sites Although the internet makes the world seem like a global place, especially for English-speaking countries, a lot of regionality still creeps in. The major social media sites enjoy some popularity in all regions, but it's important to remember that any given social media site will not be popular across the board. Look carefully at the statistics of various sites while planning your campaign of attack. It can be a good idea to talk to your SEO company for industry information on social media, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk.

Regionality is not the only thing you need to consider when selecting social media sites. Different sites attract different types of internet users. Digg, for example, is highly popular with tech-type users, but less so with other groups. It's a good idea to check whether your target site users are actually involved in the social media sites you're considering before you invest a great amount of time monitoring them.

To invest or not to invest It can be a good idea to participate on social media sites as part of your reputation management campaign. Some social media sites require a fee to post a profile. Whether you invest or not depends on the value of the site to your campaign. Check out the user profile before you do.