On Beyond the Major Social Media Sites

In our previous post, Promote Connections, we finished our series about blogging by discussing how commenting can get your blog found in the sea of millions of blogs.

In this post, we wrap up our look at the major social networking sites and recommend some other sites and social techniques for you to use.

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OK, over the last 153 posts, we’ve covered the major social media sites and given you lots of advice about how to use them for your business. But there are tons of other sites out there that you may find useful. If you don’t believe that, mosey on over to KnowEm and feast your eyes on the more than 550 sites they can help you sign up for automatically.

Not only are there scads of interesting social sites out there, but here are a few utility sites and techniques that you can use to improve your usage of blogs and your other social media efforts.

• Google Alerts — A Google Alert is a saved search that you can set to periodically email you results or, if you prefer, you can subscribe to the results via RSS. Set up Google Alerts to track terms related to your product category and your target prospects’ names, for example. You can set various preferences such as the type of item (news, blog, video, and so on), the frequency of notifications, and how many results to send.

• Social Bookmarking Sites — Use Reddit, delicious and Digg to bookmark interesting sites you come across. This is useful especially if you use multiple computers, but an added benefit is you can make your bookmarks public, thus increasing the odds of attracting like-minded people.

• FriendFeed — FriendFeed, now owned by Facebook, helps you keep track what your friends are posting on several online media. It allows you to create private groups to share information, pictures, and videos with.

• Expert Sites — Consider joining expert sites such as Squidoo and About.com to build your reputation as you share your expertise. These mostly volunteer sites are a treasure trove of tips and tricks on pretty much any topic. They are great places to showcase yourself as an expert.

• Curation Sites — Curation is one of the hottest trends in social media today. Sites such as Scoop.it, Paper.li, Storify, Pinterest, and others enable you to collect and comment on articles and images you find interesting. Martin Smith of Atlantic BT has a nice roundup of interesting curation sites. The key to using these sites is to be able to tell a story. Just reposting  material without creating a narrative adds little value and will deliver little value for your business. Karen Deitz is a master at telling stories. Her motto, expressed in an article on Paper.li, is Whoever Tells the Best Stories Wins.

• Location-Based Sites — Sites like FourSquare and, to a lesser extent, Instagram aim to exploit the benefits of local social networking and mobile computing.[1] Some may find them creepy or dangerous, but they are a growing segment of the social computing universe.

• International Social Sites — We’ve been talking about the top sites for the US, but there’s a whole world out there that isn’t American, and lots of people flock to sites like Orkut and Qzone.
  
  • Orkut, owned by Google, is extremely popular in Brazil — making up 52 percent of users — while roughly 20 percent are from India and 18 percent from the US. Orkut’s age demographics run young. More than 70 percent of users are 18 to 30 years and a whopping 57 percent are in the 18-25 age group.[2] Orkut has roughly 33 million users.
    
  • Qzone is a Chinese site founded created in 2005. Although there is a free option most Qzone services are not free. In 2012, Qzone had 597 million users.

There’s lots, lots, lots more out there that we could discuss, but let’s turn the last, and perhaps most important, posts in this series — all about building your own online community.

Next up: Building Your Community

On Beyond the Major Social Media Sites is the 154th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 393. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

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