Social Networking Sites for Anime Fans

I'm still working on mastering some of these, and I do have memberships to all of them, but be warned: Using all of these effectively will consume a lot of time that could be spent writing effective articles!

Okay, these are the most obvious ones. And if you haven't heard of them, than you've probably been living under a rock. Twitter allows you to basically advertise your Blogs for free, and you can also drive traffic to your articles through your Facebook friends, or by setting up a fan group. I personally do not promote my hubs on Facebook just yet because I prefer to remain relatively anonymous, but I haven't ruled out the possibility of doing so in the future.

Of course, thanks to groups and fanpages, Facebook is also a great way to meet people with similar interests, or find out which friends of yours are closet anime fans.

In order to Twitter effectively, you have to use it several times a day. For example, even if you haven't written anything in a few hours, go on to Twitter and "retweet" others "tweets" (a "tweet" is a 140 character message posted by a Twitter user that shows up in Twitter feeds).

Also, just "tweeting" about what you are doing at the time, or posting a favourite quote is also useful. The more you use Twitter, the more followers you're likely to get. Also, don't forget to post links to any blogs or articles you've written or have come across that are of interest. If, like me, you have a certain blogging niche, than Twitter is even more handy because most of your followers (if you keep your "tweets" on topic") will likely be people interested in your niche and more likely to view your articles.

Anihub is a microblogging site. Basically, you do status updates join groups with similar interests. I don't utilise this site as often as I could, but It's not bad. I use it mainly to promote my blog, rather than my hubpages, but since it's exclusively meant to be for anime fans, it's great for hitting the target market. On your home page will be recent forum activity from all Anihub members. (Well, the ten most recent activities that occured among Anihub members) so there is a brief chance that people will see links you post.

I also post polls and the like, and the forums are a great way to meet people, but be warned - forums are not known for having the most sensible mature people. However, forums can be great ways to get ideas for Hub and Blog topics, and you can also use backlinks in the forums, provided the content is relevant.

This kind of like Flixter for anime fans. You can post lists of the Mangas/Animes/Light Novels/other that you own, but you can also post reviews of all of them as well. Once again, it's a great way to reach out to others with similar interests, and also grow your target fanbase.

It also keeps up to date with the latest news, and has articles written by the community, similar to HubPages, however, there is no share in any advertising revenue. This is a place to reach out and get to know other anime fans.

This is it. The mother of all anime related networking sites. I've become quite the junky, and It is addictive. Forum activity is highly encouraged, and even contains an online MMO entitled zOMG! (which I have yet to try, since my crappy internet won't connect to the game servers). They've even created an entire backstory to the Gaia world, which can be read in handy anime format.

You start with an avatar that looks kind of like a hobo, then earn credits through acheivements and giveaways, plus forum activity. And while there are some forums devoted to nonsense and drabble that would convince any alien visitors that mankind is a cancer - there is an entire forum devoted to internet memes - most of the forums are pretty decent at staying on topic and the people are pretty cool. Plus once you earn enough credits, you can really customize your avatar just about any way you want. It's awesome! I cannot encourage people to use this near as often as it deserves.

While most of the networking occurs in status updates and on the forums, this is still worth checking out simply based on how much fun this site is.

Other sites that I have yet to try out are google+ (I'm on the waiting list) and TinerMe. I have an account on TinierMe, but I haven't used it enough to really appraise it. Good luck fellow otakus!