The popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter among myriads of other networks have grown by leaps and bounds in recent years that professionals, entrepreneurs and even large brands and corporations have shifter their marketing focus and headed towards this direction.

These sites offer a quick, cost-effective, and very viral way of marketing your products and services and get better results than any other new media formats. However, just as social networks make it easy to promote your brands or products -- it is also an equally easy way to damage your online reputation.

A single negative post about a professional, brand or company can get very viral in a matter of days or even hours as updates and online status can easily be read by people within these social networks. These same posts and updates can also be easily shared to all their contacts, thus exponentially increasing the damage to your internet reputation. Furthermore, social network pages are indexed by major search engines and would readily appear at the top of results pages due to the high page ranks accorded by search engines to these social networking sites.

To avoid such scenario, you need to have an effective internet reputation management program that takes into account the volatile nature of social networking sites. Professionals, brands and companies should properly set their privacy settings and as much as possible communicate or share information only with people they know. These networking sites also have search facilities, which you can use to check what people are talking about you, your brand or your company within these very dynamic pages that characterize social networks.