Top 5 social networking sites for creating account

Top 5 social networking sites for creating account

Recently one of my friend introduced me to one of his friends who had similar interests as mine. At the time of leaving she asked me my Facebook username so that she can add me as  a friend. We also exchanged our twitter handle so that we can follow each other.  After she was gone,  I was wondering that gone are the days when people used to ask for phone numbers to get in touch and now new way of interaction is social networking sites.
But there are so many social networking sites over the web that sometimes it gets difficult to decide whether you should create an account on it or not. We have analyzed and listed top 5 social networking sites on which you should definitely have an account , if you don’t have one already.

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Facebook

Founded in 2004 in Harvard University and having more than 600 million active users, Facebook tops the chart of all social networking sites. Facebook’s rank as per Alexa is #2 which is second to none other than Google. Popularity of Facebook made its CEO Mark Zuckerberg as world’s youngest billionaire and he was also named as Time magazine’s
Person of the Year 2010. On Facebook, users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests & other personal information. They can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and chat feature. Every user has a wall on which he can post his status updates , and news feed will feature post and updates from
his friends. Facebook email id has also added an emailing feature to this social networking website. One should definitely have an account on Facebook.

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Google Plus

When few days ago Google launched its ‘plus one button‘ for the web who would knew that it’s the start of a new social networking from Google. Google Plus launched in an invite only testing phase a few days ago in late May 2011, is giving direct competition to Facebook. Service was suspended in a day after extremely huge demand for accounts. Some of the major features of Google plus are
Circles : You can create circles for grouping purpose and then drag & drop contacts to add them in desired circles. You can decide the sharing level for each circle.
Streams: This feature is similar to Facebook wall and is used to post status updates and receive updates from your circles.
Hangout: Google plus has brought video chatting to its social networking and has also given an option to do group video chat up to 10 people. You create a hangout and invite friends to join in.
Google Plus is in its initial stage and as its a product from a company that is highly trusted , its definitely going to get a huge user base. We have to wait and watch to see how it will impact Facebook’s supremacy in social networking. Go ahead and try creating an account as soon as you get an invite.

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Twitter

Twitter offers social networking and micro blogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts up to 140 characters displayed on the user’s profile page. Twitter is estimated to have 200 million users and it is also used by many business to promote their brand and get followers. Users can follow people,
brands and other twitter handles which are of their interests. Many users on twitter remain inactive and just follow the updates from the one whom they follow. Short list of following and long list of followers generally means a good social influence. e.g Lady Gaga wears the title of currently having more than 11379670 followers and still growing. Justin Bieber is second and followed by Barack Obama in third position.

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LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional network service launched in 2003 and currently has more than 100 million users. Company’s has slogan of “Relationships Matter” and it allows users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship called Connections. This list of connections can be used in a number of ways e.g. used to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one’s contact network, employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates, job seekers can review the profile of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them.

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Klout

So now you have created accounts of these major network and have created lots of connections and made new friends. You might interact with them quite often but you don’t know how much they are influenced by you. It is here that role of Klout becomes important. Klout is service which provides social media analytics  i.e it measures your influence across different social networks. Currently it can be linked with your Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn account. A score of 0-100 is given to users based on their social network interactions and how much other people interact on the content shared by the user. Usually celebrities have a Klout score of above 70. You should definitely have an account on Klout if you are using any of the supported social networking sites.