Social networking websites provide a platform to build online communities for users based on interests, activities, and pre-existing relationships. The purpose of these websites is to foster greater and varied means of communication between users. The tremendous and powerful reach of social networking websites make them an ideal platform for social media optimization.

Social networking sites allow the use of different media on a common platform to enable conversations, interaction and play. A typical social network has a feature allowing users to create a public or semi-public profile which are self-description pages and recommender systems linked to trust, which can be connected to other users through devices like friend-lists and groups. Users discuss and post comments on each other's pages and also upload photos, audio files and videos to these websites.

This is one of the reasons why social media optimization is so effective on social networking sites since a plethora of communication mediums are readily available to express ideas, and information. Information moves in a rapid and wide arc on social networking websites, usually relying upon word of mouth dissemination to produce a chain of information from user to user.

Since the primary objective of social media optimization is to create a buzz about your product, utilizing social networking sites is a step in the right direction because one in every five Internet users worldwide has an active profile on a social networking websites, popular or niche. Conversations are happening online, you just have to tap the potential of these conversations with effective social media optimization.