A new website has entered the social networking space for small businesses. The name is Briz.com.

After playing around with this website for a little bit I’ve discovered that there is much more to it than one might expect simply by the brief description above. There are some unique features to Briz.com that make it stand out above other social networking sites. The obvious comparisons are MySpace, Facebook, and LinkIn. But Briz.com is nothing like any of these, but it does provide some of the same features as each.

For instance, like Facebook, you can open a profile and network with other local businesses, but unlike Facebook, Briz.com is organized so that consumers can have an account and save their favorite local businesses into a group called My Briz while the business owners themselves can establish a profile that gives a complete description of their business and allows them to network with consumers, other businesses, and suppliers.

One unique feature that I like about Briz.com is that you add other businesses to your profile. If you own a chain of stores, for instance, you can add a profile for each location and choose to put them under the same profile heading or create a separate profile page for each business. You can do this all through one account. Briz.com also allows marketing companies to create a marketing account and manage the business profiles of their clients, another feature that I find to be extremely helpful (wink wink).

Briz.com is not intuitive until you start setting up your business account. I did have a little difficulty figuring out how to navigate from setting up a personal account to getting the business profile started. But once I figured that out, setting up the business profile was easy.

If you are a local business and you are looking for a way to network with other local businesses and consumers in your area then Briz.com looks like a good resource.

As a consumer, you can send messages to businesses, add them as favorites and friends, visit websites, vote on your favorite businesses, and post feedback about businesses. Briz.com offers businesses an opportunity to connect to consumers, suppliers and other businesses and provides consumers a way to rate their favorite businesses. Not a bad system at all.

Would you like Small Business Mavericks to set you up a business profile at Briz.com? We can.