Social Media - 13 Sites I Use and Why
This is something I was planning to save until later, but two different people asked me about it. The title tells you what they asked - which sites do I use and why?
Here is a list of the sites I'm using:
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (of course)
FriendFeed, Ping and OnlyWire (Aggregators)
Diigo, Delicious, Digg and Technorati (Bookmarking and news)
YouTube and Motionbox (Video)
UStreamTV and Viddler (also Video - I'll explain why they're separate)
Meetup (Local Networking)
Squidoo, HubPages, Technorati and Wiki (Thought Leadership)
Okay, not counting that I listed Technorati twice, that's actually 18 sites. It's not that I can't count or that I'm trying to "over deliver" or anything. Five of those sites I'm only just starting to use and get familiar with.
Now let me show you why I'm using each site:
Truly social networking - chatting, funny e-mail, that kind of stuff.
I have a professional profile here, and that helps generate traffic to my blog. I'm also developing a Page for my business, but I'm not quite sure what to do with it yet. That's in the "creative thought" stage (a.k.a. look around like crazy for ideas stage).
And, of course, the groups. Right now, I'm part of 5 groups. That number changes based on whether a group turns out to be what I expected. I joined a digital photography group earlier this year that I ended up leaving just because it was more advanced than I was ready for. You can always re-join a group later.
I definitely belong to groups here. The groups are great places to learn and participate by asking/answering questions.
I get a daily digest from each group, and I definitely do NOT read every digest every day. A great thing about the digests is that they're cumulative.
If you miss reading a digest for two or three days, when you finally get to read one - it has all the content you missed. That means I can split my reading up and just read the digest from two groups each day.
In my opinion, the most powerful feature of LinkedIn is being able to see who other people are connected to. To pick reviewers for my book and participants for the Voices of Influence program, you know I want to choose good people. You can also imagine that there's no way I'm personally connected to 200 potential reviewers or even 30 of the influential voices in social media.
Continued on the next page
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