This year is predicted to be the biggest year for Social Media and with the increased reliance, trust and value of consumer opinions and product reviews, most people will be scouting for the best offers and purchasing online.

The Search Engine Watch team has decided to take it upon themselves to help businesses by conducting an analysis into the “Sweet 16” Social Media Networks that companies should leverage, as highlighted below:

The match-ups for region-1 include Facebook ‘v’ Yammer and Delicious ‘v’ Orkut. It was found that Facebook was extremely good for setting up groups and fan pages and with over 170 million users worldwide it is the fastest growing social media network.Delicious is an extremely good social bookmarking website to save and manage useful bookmarks to articles and resources as well as to determine the popularity of these articles. Orkut is the most popular social network in India, Brazil and Latin America. This makes it a brilliant marketing tool to target the market in those areas.Yammer is an internal private social network, registration to this network is only permitted if a valid company email exists. The network can reduce the size of your outlook inbox considerably by leveraging it to make company announcements, leaving outlook to send emails that actually require a response.

The next dose of “Who will be crowned King of Social Media?” will look at the match-ups for region-2 as well as the winners and losers of region-1.