This cheat sheet has been revised. Please click Social Media Cheat Sheet for the updated version.
Are you spending too much time trying to figure out how to leverage social media for your business? Maybe you are just waiting to see some quantitative results before diving in. You know there's value in doing it, but the perceived ROI doesn't look very good when senior management's time is at stake.
This marketing blog will help you get organized before you dive in. Just save this page to your favorite places for quick and easy access to the top services. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list since there are hundreds of social networking sites that may not be as effective for business. It is also important to note that the services listed below are most recognized in U.S. and may not be the top choices internationally. I hope you find this resource helpful.
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Aggregation Tools: FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm, Lijit, Ping.fm, Socializr, Socialthing!
Blogs: Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress
Bookmarks: Delicious, Digg, Livejournal, Mixx, Newsvine, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Yahoo! Buzz
Free Business Listings: BizHWY, Cardboard, Crunchbase, Jigsaw, MerchantCircle, NextMark, Tradvibes, and many more out there!
Marketing Trends (2): Google Trends, Universe TrendsPost Documents: Google Docs, Scribd
Post PowerPoint Presentations: AuthorSTREAM, Google Docs, Myplick, Slideshare
Post Videos: Vimeo, YouTube
Social Networks: Crowdvine, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo
Twitter Tools: MyTweeple, TweetDeck, TweetLater, Twibes, Twitter
URL Shorteners: bit.ly, budURL, Snurl, TinyURL, tr.im, Twurl
Wikis: Pbwiki, Wetpaint, Wikipedia
Be careful which URL shortener you use as it may affect your future search rankings.
Your feedback is welcome, and encouraged, as to what works best for business. As NextMark's Director of Business Development, I've found LinkedIn and YouTube to produce the best marketing results.
Hootsuite is the best Twitter tool that I've used for business. Using their ow.ly url shortener, you can track the click through rates of the links you tweet- great to help judge your influence amongst your follwers! Hootsuite gives you stats and allows you to schedule tweets into the future, so you can get a good amount of SMM work done when you have the time to sit down and pound it out. I've found it very helpful in "justifying" the time I spend on Twitter to upper management.
Posted by: Laura Jones | May 07, 2009 at 01:40 PM
Thanks for the list. I jumped right on some of these and found some invaluable stuff out there. I had never seen the PPT posting sites but it makes sense in the YouTube vein...
Posted by: Craig | May 10, 2009 at 11:51 PM