Top 100 Social Media Cheat Sheet for Business

Social marketing is on the rise and it's here to stay. Are you still trying to figure out how to leverage social media for your business? You can start by learning the language with definitions from the marketing glossary, and then use this cheat sheet as a reference for most commonly used tools.

A few months ago a cheat sheet was introduced as a tool to help marketers get organized with Web 2.0 and social media marketing. Many new services have emerged since then. Therefore, several of those respective web sites have been added to this page as a quick reference linking to 100 free social marketing resources and online directories.

Bookmark this page or add it to your favorite places for quick and easy access to several of the top services by category. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, and some of these sites may not be the top choices internationally. However, it is a valuable resource for leveraging many of the top networks in the U.S., and can help you gain some international exposure as well.

Basic services must be free to qualify for inclusion on the top 100 list below. For your convenience, each title is linked directly to the respective site's home page. I hope you will find this to be a helpful resource for your business. Feel free to connect with me (DeMartine) on LinkedIn if you would like to share other resources that are available online.

 

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Free Social Media Resources (Top 100)

Aggregation Tools (5):  Bloglines, FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm, Lijit, YouBundle

Blogs (7):  Blog.com, Blogger, Livejournal, Posterous, Tumblr, Typepad, Wordpress

Blog Directories (10):  Blogapedia, Blogarama, BlogCatalog, Blogdirs, Blog Flux, Bloghub, Blog Listing, Blogtoplist, BritBlog, Technorati

Bookmarks (12):  Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Fark, Mixx, MyBlogLog, Newsvine, Propeller, Reddit, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz

Comment Systems (2):  DISQUS, IntenseDebate

Free Directory Listings (25):  Akama, Bateekh, BizHWY, Cardboard, CrunchBase, DMOZ, EVliving, GetFreeListing, Google Local, IllumiRate, Jayde, Jigsaw, Librarians' Internet Index, Little Web Directory, Manta, MerchantCircle, NextMark, Simple Directory, Spoke, SuperPages, Tradevibes, TurnPike, WebBuyersGuide, Web World, Yahoo! Local

Name Checks (2):  Namechk, Usernamecheck

Post Documents (3):  eHow, Google Docs, Scribd

Post Presentations (3):  AuthorSTREAM, Myplick, Slideshare

Post Videos (2):  Vimeo, YouTube

Press Releases: (4):  i-Newswire, PR.com, PressReleasePoint, PRLog.org

Publish Articles (5):  ArticleDashboard, Articles FACTORY, Ezinearticles, IdeaMarketers, Yahoo Articles Group

Social Networks (8):  Biznik, Crowdvine, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, NowPublic, Plaxo, Viadeo

Twitter Tools (5):  Grader, Ping, TweetDeck, TweetLater, Twitter

URL Shorteners (4):  bit.ly, doiop, memurl, TinyURL

Wikis (3):  Pbwiki, Wetpaint, Wikipedia

Tip:  Since PageRank is important to your exposure on the Google search engine results page (SERP), you may want to check out the page rank for each of these services as well. That can be done for free online by using the PageRank Checker (higher = better).

Tip:  adding your blog to the directories can improve your search rankings and exposure; the same is true for your web site and your business. That's the reason for including 35 directory listings (25 free directory listings + 10 blog directories) in the top 100. You only need to do it once, so take advantage of them.

Question:  Web 3.0 is to  ?   as Web 2.0 is to social media...

Your feedback is welcome!  

Comments

[Michael Peck]

Great list. Another good URL shortener is tr.im (http://tr.im.com).

[Seetha]

Thank you so much for sharing such an interesting piece on Social Media Marketing which is definitely worth sharing.I am working in a leading Search & Social Media marketing firm called Position2 Inc.and your article is really helpful for me.

[Chris DeMartine]

Thanks for your comment Michael! You're righta about tr.im being a good (and popular) URL shortener. It was actually #5 on my list of URL shorteners. I needed to drop it to hold the list to the 'top 100' and the free directory listings took precedence.

[Lu]

thanks for the info! just one point - google no longers allows uploading of videos, only watching. since they bought youtube, google is no longer allowing uploades :(

[Morgan Griffith]

This is a great list, thanks for sharing.

I'd also recommend eCrowds, which provides blogs, posting of videos, b2b social networks, and Twitter tools (of the list above).

eCrowds is a SaaS content, community, and SEO management system that is being offered for free in 2009: http://www.eCrowds.com

Users can sign-up for a free account at: http://www.ecrowds.com/api/account_signup to get started hosting and managing their corporate website and its community for free. It's a really easy tool to use, I'd recommend it to anyone getting started with managing a B2B website and its social features.

[Pinto Philip]

Great links , on your Question on Web 3.0 is to ? as Web 2.0 is to social media , i think we are moving towards Unified communications and to make this easily usable accross the globe Web 3.0 is going to play a major role.

unified communications, the ability to unify live and passive forms of communications (office phone, cell phone, email, voice mail, etc.) to direct important people to the live person wherever he or she may be

[Clay C]

Question: Web 3.0 is to ? as Web 2.0 is to social media...

Answer: semantic search

[Rusty]

I have a great page rank checker http://www.getranking.info

Works better than the one you listed.

[Social Bookmarking]

really appreciated

[tatxe]

I justt add Viadeo (www.viadeo.com), is the second biggest professional network.

[Chris DeMartine]

Good suggestion, I did a little research on Viadeo and it passed the evaluation. It hasn't gotten much traction in the U.S. yet, but due to its international reach it certainly qualifies. Thanks for your feedback!

[Lynne]

Thanks for Sharing!

[Mike]

Great Information on some of the top Free Social Media Resources!
Thanks for the Post presentations info...

[Ryan Reagles]

Thanks for the compilation!

[Top 10 vacation spots]

Great roadmap! However, consider a z-axis. The z-axis would 'pull' content from multiple sources on your existing x and y-axis, combining them with internal marketing material, then 'pushing' the resulting as part of a marketing campaign (geoIP, market or time based). There are marketing platforms such as SmartSymbols Marketing Platform that already facilitate this. So, a z-axis would be most helpful. For example; Europe consumers don't do much with Twitter, so a geoIP marketing campaign for Europe using Twitter would be bad. Linkedin is more business related, so a marketing campaign for an individual or corporation using Linkedin is good.

[Tina]

Thank you! B2B Social Media/Viral marketing has been extremely rewarding using the right resources and when done correctly.

Great resources collected here.

Tina

[Patrick Long]

Great list of social media resources! Nowadays, social media platforms are widely used by SEOs because through using these platforms, making your customers learn about your product will be more enjoyable and less cumbersome.

[KPO Companies]

This is an outstanding resource. Thanks so much for sharing. This is one of the best summaries I've seen. I will be sharing this with my readers. Excellent rundown on the strengths of different media sites. Already downloaded mine. Thanks so much.

Jaiden

[Call Center Outsource]

Really trustworthy blog. Thanks for sharing. A blog really owes its success to its loyal readers and faithful followers. Please keep updating with great posts like this one. I will bookmark this post in my Propeller account. Have a great day!

Best,
Yolanda

[adam]

This is really great info thank you, this is just what I need

[SEO Management Consulting]

Nice source and this is one of the best strategies in SEO. This may help for the growth of the business. These top social media sites are better if a person knows how to do this for posting specially in blogs.

Thanks and good luck for your new great articles like this.

[Structural Engineer CV]

Superb resource shared! thanks dude..keep it up..very helpful indeed

[commenting system]

This is a great list you've got here, thanks! Social networks is an enormously growing marketing tool.

[Directory Europe]

Thanks for this great list! I've been trying to put one of these together myself but I always miss out one or two items here or there!!

[records management]

Thanks for your information provided. Social media marketing as Web 2.0 is to social media , i think we are moving towards Unified communications and to make this easily usable accross the globe Web 3.0 is going to play a major role.
It is mainly used for SEO purpose.

[Samsung]

hasn't gotten much traction in the U.S. yet, but due to its international reach it certainly qualifies. Thanks

[Tassimo Brewbot]

"Top 100 Social Media Cheat Sheet for Business"

Wonderful, educative article for sure. I am going to share it

[seo consultant]

Helpful advises above. I have noticed that many people are using twitter for marketing. I would love to try this too for my business.

[MATC]

This is very valuable information! We love to use social media to get the word out about our courses! Thanks for sharing!

[engineering jobs,engineering resumes]

We are your nexus for engineering jobs & resumes. EngineerNexus.Com is a comprehensive, leading edge, state of the art, engineering jobs and resumes portal.

Yes really, and it’s needed too. Finding websites that offer quality and up-to-date engineering jobs and resumes can be a difficult prospect. Years ago,
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[business it support]

Business computer support is difficult to find a service that is both affordable and effective. Other factors such as number of users the business type and geographical location can also add to the challenge. Even small businesses long term is difficult to define, unless you use specific criteria.

[Jimmy Choo Chaussures]

It's so nice to have you do all of the research for us. It makes our decision making so much easier!! Thanks.

[Valentines Treasure Hunt]

Thanks for the info. Very well written article. I’ve used a bunch of these sites and had some success with building my search engine ranking as a result so they definitely work.