Ever wonder what the differences between social networking and social booking are? The terms get intermixed, which gets confusing.
Here’s the differences between the two and when you might want to use them.
Social networking Sites provide more of an interaction between its members. For example, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ all allow you to find friends, family, acquaintances, business connections and connect with them socially using messages, pictures or video.
If you’re in business on the web or have a website, social networking has become vital to helping you establish credibility, getting your business noticed and helping the search engines determine your popularity.
Social bookmarking Sites on the other hand are sites for storing, organizing and managing all your favorite links and websites.
But some of these social sites offer both bookmarking and networking features. Here are some social sites that can be used for both purposes.
The Social Networking Features of Twitter are:
- Following Twitter users
- Seeing Status updates for those you follow
- Messaging through @replies
- Private messaging
Although Twitter is more for social networking and sharing, it does offer a bookmarking feature: You can save your favorite tweets in your ‘Favorites’ by clicking on the Favorites star.
More Sites that Offer Social Networking and Social Bookmarking
Facebook also has social networking and bookmarking features as well. Social Networking Features include:
- Posting messages
- Messaging on walls
- Adding Facebook members as friends
- Private messaging through Facebook email
- Connect through applications
- Join groups and fan pages
Most of us wouldn’t think of Facebook as a social bookmarking site, and it’s really not designed for that, but you could bookmark a link by commenting in your status and adding the URL there. Then flag it for ‘only me’ instead of Public.
However with so many other great bookmarking tools, I don’t recommend using Facebook for book marking.
Del.icio.us
The Delicious Social Networking features include adding Delicious members to your network. Delicious, however is better designed as a social bookmarking site and is probably one of the best when it comes to bookmarking. You can use Delicious to bookmarks using reviews and tags.
You can bookmark posts with descriptive tags. Socially you can connect with others by sharing your content using their email service.
LinkedIn is gaining in popularity as a social networking site as it connects you with interested contacts and lets you exchange ideas, knowledge, websites, posts and opportunities. In fact LinkedIn is used quite a bit for increasing visibility when looking for someone to hire or looking for a job. In my opinion, LinkedIn is much better at social networking.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon has a good mix of social networking and social bookmarking.
The Social networking features of StumbleUpon include connecting with StumbleUpon’s members. StumbleUpon lets you connect with members you may already have on Facebook. You an also connect with other members through their email service or their private messaging.
StumbleUpon also has a social bookmarking feature that lets you save bookmarks with tags and reviews.
You can use StumbleUpon purely for social bookmarking by stumbling your interests with the thumbs up icon which will save your sites to your likes.
Social Networking and Social Bookmarking Take Away…
Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Google Bookmarks are favorites for Social bookmarking.
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn are favorites for Social Networking.
I personally struggle with bookmarking. I haven’t found a really great bookmarking site that I like, probably because I haven’t taken the time to really work at getting set up without confusing myself 
Share with us your favorite Social Networking sites, and have you found a social bookmarking site that works well for you?
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