Social Media 201

Social Media 201A Social Media Cheat Sheet

introduction to the social media platforms that are growing in popularity

Social Media 101: The Ones You Might Know

Behance

What is it?Portfolio platform for creative professionals across multiple design and marketing industries. It recently gained compatibility with LinkedIn to provide portfolio display on profiles.

How Can it Help My Business?Behance is an excellent resource for individuals in virtually any creative industry. The search functions available in Behance provide excellent tools for hiring creative personnel as well as identifying new trends and practices in the design industry.

Blogger

What is it?Blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. Blogger is currently owned and operated by Google and compatible with many Google apps.

How Can it Help My Business?Blogging can serve as an effective replacement for newsletters as a means of informing customers of recent promotions and details about the company.

Digg

What is it?Social news site where users vote stories “up” or “down” (or “digg up” and “bury” respectively). Digg's monthly U.S. unique visits are estimated at 7.2 million.

How Can it Help My Business?Properly utilizing social news sites can make a business’ site or product go viral; drastically increasing site traffic and brand awareness.

FriendFeed

What is it?Real-time feed aggregator that consolidates updates from social media, social networking, blogging, microblogging, and social bookmarking sites.

How Can it Help My Business?Has been used to organize data from several social media sites into a more convenient feed for customers and for internal use for a company.

Flickr

What is it?Image and video hosting website, web hosting suite, and online community.

As opposed to a standard photo feed on a company website, Flickr can be a very effective way to demonstrate products in a more personal setting.

How Can it Help My Business?

Last.fm

What is it?Social media site dedicated to sharing and experiencing new music. It builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the songs the user listens to.

How Can it Help My Business?Customers often recognize businesses in the music industry that effectively utilize music social media platforms as credible and personable organizations (It’s also a great way to identify potential customers).

Netvibes

What is it?Personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web including digital life management, widget distribution services, and brand observation rooms.

How Can it Help My Business?It can provide a business considerable internal benefits by conveniently organizing all relevant information into a single dashboard.

Posterous

What is it?Simple blogging platform that supports integrated and automatic posting for Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. It also contains a multitude of applications for mobile blogging.

How Can it Help My Business?Posterous’ user-friendly interface and options for integrating other social media platforms make it a great tool for small businesses.

Qik

What is it?Mobile live video streaming and two-way video conferencing application that allows users to stream live video or upload recorded video from supported mobile devices.

How Can it Help My Business?Qik was acquired by Skype, and shares many of the business functions of Skype. The new QikSMS service is a great tool for professionals to send reminders to clients about appointments (ex: Doctors, hair stylists, etc.)

Reddit

What is it?Social media site very similar to Digg with the exception of a point-system unique to Reddit. Users are given “Karma” based on how many other people “up-vote” their content.

How Can it Help My Business?Businesses can use Reddit to help establish its legitimacy by posting engaging and thoughtful industry and company news. Because of Reddit’s “karma” point-system, businesses are openly validated on the quality of their posts and their expertise.

Slideshare

What is it?Online slide hosting service. Slide decks can be viewed on the site itself and embedded on other sites. The site has over 15 million slideshows and one million registered users.

How Can it Help My Business?Slideshare can be a very effective tool for spreading brand-awareness. Businesses can create content, share it, and develop an open dialogue directly with their customers and the community.

Squidoo

What is it?Community website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. 50% of Squidoo’s annual revenue is donated to charitable organizations around the world.

How Can it Help My Business?Much like any other blogging site, Squidoo is a great tool for optimizing search engine results and driving-up web traffic, but because of the philanthropic nature of the site, is an especially useful blogging platform for non-profit organizations and charities.

StumbleUpon

What is it?Discovery engine (a form of web search engine) that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social networking principles.

How Can it Help My Business?Submitting helpful or thought-provoking information to StumbleUpon opens the possibility for interested users to directly reach the material, rank it, and share it with friends.

Technorati

How Can it Help My Business?Internet engine for searching blogs. Technorati currently indexes 11.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

What is it?Businesses that are blogging can take enormous advantage of Technorati as a tool for promoting and sharing their blogs. It reaches a very specific demographic of users, it allows publishers to anchor their blogs to key words, and it has its own directory for easy access.

Tumblr

What is it?Microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog.

How Can it Help My Business?Tumblr is a quickly growing sensation that is proving to be an excellent way for businesses to expand their presence.

Wordpress

What is it?Open source blogging tool and publishing platform with many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Internet.

How Can it Help My Business?Not only can it provide blogging opportunities for businesses, but it is a wide-reaching arm to capitalize on Search Engine Optimization.