Social communities are extremely popular these days Facebook.com, Twitter.com, MySpace.com, Delicious.com, and Digg.com, are just some to mention.  So how do they make money?  Social communities are Big Business these days.  How can these companies turn free offers and services into money in the bank? There are Pros and Cons of social communities that you may not realize.For example look at Apple.comand their app store, there are over 350 apps available including games that can be sold to over 450 million users.  Apple takes a percentage of the app sale.  Now just like Apple, Facebook for the past month and their fans have been viewing streamed videos from Warner Bros. in exchange for $4 in Facebook credits.Facebook has advertising right at the heart of their internet success story.  You are creating the content for FREE for them.  The social network sites bring the people together and give them a forum to reach out to others on.  In addition to this they need only to post the ad next to the content.

Content is King, it is why people come to you and social communities.  But you need to have also great search engine rankings for your name to be listed high enough to be found.  Some marketing strategies for increasing your ranking is getting more links to your site, increasing backlinks and generating traffic to you.  For this reason many businesses are turning to social communities as a way of driving clicks and viewers to their site increasing their search engine rankings.  They pay Facebook or another social network site a percentage of the sale.

Here are some pros and cons of social communities.  A pro is the business will offer free deals to people who come in through Facebook.com for example.  In exchange for the free offer those people need to make a shout out about that business on Facebook showing everyone that they like this product or business.  The con is their social networking account and personal information is linked to that site. For the most part people just want the free stuff they don’t mind but it should be noted.  Now Facebook users see that a friend just received this free deal at this restaurant and goes to that website.  That business owner just created organic traffic to their website and it costs a fraction of a printed advertisement.

In the example above with Warner Bros., Facebook received 30% for each credit spent on a movie, at $4 a movie that is $1.20 for each one that’s pretty great to me.  This is the age where online advertising, video marketing, and social media is breaking ground in internet marketing.  The way business owners promote and advertise their business is forever changing and if you want to stay ahead you need to be online and know the pros and cons of social communities.  Use all the tools you can to beat the competition and drive traffic to your website or blog.