Which Social Media Networks Do I Choose?
There are hundreds upon hundreds of social networking sites in the web.
Social Media Marketing is All About Choosing the Right Communities for You
You want to be involved with the ones that work best for your company – sites like Facebook, MySpace, MyBlogLog, Squidoo and Twitter are all great general sites for any company, but sites like ActiveRain, Trulia or CafeMom are for target niches that may be even more effective for you in the long run.
Its important to match your company with the niche you’re targeting. You are absolutely wasting time if you’re on a social site you shouldn’t be on, and that’s why you need to know that if you’re a finance company you should a site like Tip’d (think Digg for the finance industry) and bypass Digg itself altogether.
Digg and Newsvine do better with news stories, Propeller and Reddit do better with human and general interest stories, Stumbleupon does well with almost any topic. MySpace isn’t just for teens and Facebook Fan Pages are useful for any company, no matter the industry.
However, social sites are a waste of time if you set them up and never use them. You might as well have never set anything up at all. If you create an account and expect people to just find you and add you, you’re doing it wrong.
Further, you need to have specific strategies for each and every network you’re on. If you create a strategy but fail to execute it, your time was wasted. Mistakes like these are why many Social Media Campaigns don’t get anywhere.
Unlike other forms of marketing and advertising, SMM allows you to go super niche – you could literally target a social community of pink-yarn knitting grandmas if that was your desire.
Thus the social networks you choose are entirely dependent on your company, your goals and your ultimate strategy.
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Your post on Social media choices was great. But how does one find out which of the lesser known social media sites are related to one’s own niche. Is that a way or a method or an online tool, perhaps a directory, listing social media sources based upon niches?
Just curious.
Daniel Tetreault.
I use them all… im not that bothered about branding but am interested in my technique of using social media to quickly build relevant sections on a 3rd party domain that pass small but powerful link juice.
It has been my experience that you do not want to get involved with some socal media sites. You don’t want your company looking cheesey because of its affiliation with a low rent social media site. I have always tried to keep my companies on the major players only. Just an image thing I guess.
Dennis Bellows´s last blog ..Dock Leveler Skirt