Businesses have also discovered that these social networking sites can be valuable resources for more than just marketing, as many are using them for recruitment purposes, a recent survey found.

The latest CareerBuilder survey found that 45 percent of employers use social networking sites to research potential job candidates - an increase from last year's 22 percent.

Of those who do not currently use social media for that purpose, 11 percent plan to start doing so.

Facebook emerged as the most popular platform for screening job applicants, with 29 percent of hiring managers indicating that it is their website of choice, followed by LinkedIn at 26 percent and MySpace at 21 percent. Twitter ranked lower than blogs, used by 7 percent of respondents as opposed to 11 percent for blogs.

While the rapidly growing popularity of social media websites can be good news for small businesses in terms of marketing and recruitment, it may pose some issues for job seekers who have not been attentive to their social networking presence, experts say.