With hundreds of millions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google Plus, how do you navigate dating on social networks? Some singles say they’re better than traditional dating sites at giving you a full picture of the object of your affections — for better or worse.

Panama Jackson, who blogs at Very Smart Brothas and recently co-wrote the book Your Degrees Won’t Keep You Warm At Night, says you get a lot of insight into a person’s life when you see the kinds of things they tweet about and if their tweet totals are closer to 40,000 than, say, 5,000.

“The beauty of Twitter is that when something excites you, at that moment you can tell random people and have a conversation about it,” he said. “Once that excitement is gone, it’s hard to relive it. Point here is, if you are both talking about all the important stuff via Twitter, what the hell do you talk about when you do actually ever talk?”

Jackson said he’s found that some of his dating prospects like to vent about life and tweet things that make him second-guess his initial attraction. He’s had about six dates with women he met on Twitter, and although not all of them were disastrous, one was a woman he classified as crazy.

“Twitter is free and Facebook is free, so you never know what you’re getting. There’s a deterrent if I have to pay $50 for a profile, because I might take it more seriously.”

Jackson cautions that flirting online can lead to jealousy, which is likely to intensify the crazy early on.

“I recommend not following or friending people on Facebook or Twitter if you’re interested in them, actually,” he said. “I’ve learned from following some of the women I know that there was interest there, and then I realized, ‘Some of your thoughts actually scare me, and now I have to find a reason to avoid you.’ ”

One way to help gauge someone’s credentials is to see if they have a profile on LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site. Allison Peacock, a communications and marketing specialist who blogs at Living Radically Well, likes LinkedIn because “it just helps with the confidence level when you’re meeting people anonymously at first.”

She doesn’t advertise her single status or use sites like Twitter to date, but if she meets someone on a dating site, she uses social media networks to look at the profiles and comments of her prospective suitors “to see more about who they really are outside of the presentation they make on a dating site.”

That’s becoming a more common approach as dating using social media becomes more popular, says University of Texas psychology professor Sam Gosling. And Facebook in particular gives singles better insight into their potential partners than fee-based online dating sites.

One of the things Gosling studies is how people create environments that provide insights into their personalities and how they would like to be perceived.

“There are some crucial differences between social media and online dating sites, and one of them is that people tend to trust social media sites, since there’s a great deal of overlap between their online and offline friends,” Gosling said. “The impression people have of folks based on their Facebook profile tends to be pretty accurate.”

If anything, he says, it’s the online dating sites that can lead to more of a false impression because there’s no circle of 2,000 friends or even 100 to hold people accountable.

“If I say I’m an excellent cyclist on Match.com or EHarmony, no one will say, ‘No you’re not,’ ” Gosling said.

“But if I friend you on Facebook, I’m not just giving you my impression of me, I’m letting you into my social circle and letting you see what other people say about me and what other people post on my wall. The bottom line is that it’s really an accurate way of learning about people.”