Facebook Comments: adds Facebook’s comment system to your website, making your site more interactive in the process.

Simple Twitter Connect: a modular plugin that adds simple Twitter functions to your website. You will be in control of what you want your visitors to be able to do with their Twitter account on your blog.

LinkedIn InShare button: adds LinkedIn’s InShare button to your website without you having to do any coding.

WordPress Quora Badge: adds your Quora activities to WordPress. Includes the questions you have asked/answered and the items you have interacted with.

Credit: WordPress.org

FourSquare Integration: useful for those of you active in the Foursquare community. Displays your latest check-ins on your blog.

WP-Walla: useful for those of you who are still using Gowalla to discover local places in your area. It displays your check-ins on your site.

Tumblr: allows you to integrate your Tumblr account into WordPress to manage your Tumblr content more effectively.

The above plugins not only make your website more social media friendly, they provide your visitors with more ways to connect with you and share your content. Please do share your favorite social media plugins for WordPress.

BuddyPress: BuddyPress is very dear to my heart as it’s created by the people behind WordPress. It’s very similar to what we have come to see with WordPress and can be enhanced with themes and scripts. It’s open source, so you have a lot of flexibility there as well.

Elgg: Elgg is a very powerful social networking platform that enables you to create your very own Facebook-like social network fast. Your users can create their own blogs, forums, and groups. It also helps that you can take advantage of third-party enhancements to offer even more features to your visitors.

Pligg: Pligg is another powerful social networking platform that enables you to create your own Digg-like website fast. It’s a bit tougher to customize and the code is not as easy to figure out. But the platform does save you money and can be enhanced through third-party themes and plugins.

Ning: Ning does not need any introduction. The platform is designed to help you create your own social network online fast. You can use the free option to create a social network quickly. The premium option allows you to use Ning on your own domain and gives you more control as well.

WordPress MU: very similar to WordPress, but it comes handy if you are planning to create your own blog network. Your visitors can start their own WordPress blog and have you host it for them.

Social Go: another social networking solution that has a little bit of everything. There are plenty of widgets and themes that you can pick up to give your social network a different look and feel. It’s mostly designed for those who are new to this business. But you can always go with its advanced plans.

There you have it. 6 powerful social networking platforms that enable you create your own social network service fast.

Social bookmarking sites are yet another source of links for bloggers and search engine optimizers. Web services such as Delicious and Mixx can bring you lots of targeted SEO traffic. As long as your listings become popular on delicious, there is no reason you can drive a ton of traffic to your website. Considering that delicious is now closely linked to Twitter, your traffic can multiply in a fairly short period of time. One of the best ways to build traffic through social bookmarking sites such as Digg is by participating in the community and making friends. There are a lot of people who will return you the favor if you help their content go viral. Besides, the more people you know on these sites, the better shot your content gets at going viral.

I recommend you adopt a multi-faceted strategy to take advantage of social bookmarking sites. Sites such as Delicious, Digg, and Mixx are worth being a part of and participating in. You can also add a few niche communities to reach out to others in your niche and get more people to visit your blog. You won’t have time to be a part of every little social bookmarking community, which is why you should use a service such as Social Maximizer to get the job done. There are plenty of social bookmarking submission sites that help you submit your site automatically, but since I haven’t tried them I can’t vouch for them.

Social Maximizer is the main service that I have used to outsource my social bookmarking submission process and focus on more important chores on a daily basis. Just like Directory Maximizer, Social Maximizer provides you with a self-service submission feature that lets you optimize your lists and target the sites you want to show up on. There are plenty of social bookmarking sites that do pass link juice to your blog, so if you acquire those links, you are going to get a lot of value from your investment. At the end of the day, you shouldn’t try to spam these sites. Your goal should be to get your highly useful content in front of more people. But if you are planning to get your blog indexed fast and drive a decent amount of organic traffic to your website, social bookmarking websites are worth targeting. Just remember, content is still king when it comes to taking advantage of the social media.