21 Social Media and Web 2.0 Sites to Focus Your Internet Marketing Efforts
Most Internet marketers who are marketing through social media sites and web 2.0 sites have limited time on a daily basis. To spend their time more effectively, below are 21 sites that are probably worth focusing their Internet marketing efforts. The types of sites include news aggregators, social networking, website discovery, social bookmarking, video aggregators, page submission and creation, and blog popularity ranking.
News Aggregating Sites:
Below are sites that allow users to submit new stories, rate the stories and comment on the stories.
#1. Digg (www.digg.com)
Digg is a community-based news article popularity web site that allows people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Voting is conducted by users (instead of editors) on topics from the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog. This method of rating allows people to collectively determine the value of contents and the way people consume information online. All contents on Digg are submitted by their community (their users).
#2. Propeller (www.propeller.com)
Propeller is the social news portal that is backed by AOL. All of the stories on Propeller are submitted and voted on by its members.
#3. Sphinn (www.sphinn.com)
Sphinn is a social website for search and interactive marketers. It allows marketers to submit, share and discover stories, and take part in discussions.
#4. Slashdot (www.slashdot.org)
Slashdot is a social website focusing on technology-related news stories that are posted by its users.
#5. Reddit (www.reddit.com)
Reddit is another user-generated, social news website where users can post links to content on the web. Other users may then vote the posted links.
#6. Newsvine (www.newsvine.com)
Newsvine is an open-source community website that focuses on news stories and opinions. It allows members to customize the news viewed and users can write articles, post links to external content, and chat about article pages.
Social Networking Sites:
Below are platforms that allow users to connect to other users in a sociable way.
#7. Facebook (www.facebook.com)
Facebook is a social platform that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. Users are regularly being fed the latest news, activities and interests of their friends.
In the last several months, Facebook has been regarded by many experienced Internet marketers that it can become one of the biggest threads to cease the domination of Google on the World Wide Web.
#8. LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)
LinkedIn is a networking platform for business users to discover inside connections. Users can build and extend new business contacts via their existing trusted contacts. LinkedIn also allows users to discover what their colleagues (or connections) are reading and stay updated on what their network is up to. For many specialists, they can be regularly connected to new job opportunities. For managers, they can discover people with the right skills to outsource their projects.
#9. Xing (www.xing.com)
Xing is a social networking platform for business professionals. The platform makes it easy for finding deals, employees, colleagues, and jobs and opening doors to many companies.
#10. Mybloglog (www.mybloglog.com)
Mybloglog is a social networking website for bloggers to market their blogs and is a platform for creating ad-hoc networks around blogs. Since its acquisition by Yahoo, many new features have been added and Mybloglog’s user base has been integrated into Yahoo’s existing user base.
#11. Twitter (www.twitter.com)
Twitter is a social messaging and micro-blogging utility for staying connected in real-time in which it utilizes instant messaging, text messaging or a web interface.
#12. Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com)
Yahoo! Answers is a platform to find and share information. Users can ask questions on any topic of discussion and can get answers from real people. It also provides different versions for certain regions such as this one for the UK users.
Website Discovery Sites:
Sites that allow the discovery of new web sites that are of your interests.
#13. Stumbleupon (www.stumbleupon.com)
StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on the interests of its users. It learns what users prefer and brings them more similar websites.
Social Bookmarking Sites:
Bookmarking of web pages is becoming easier than ever, if you use one or some of the web-based social bookmarking communities below.
#14. De.licio.us (del.icio.us)
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, categorizing, sharing, and discovering web URLs. It also allows its users to find out what other people are bookmarking.
#15. Furl (www.furl.net)
Furl is a Looksmart-owned social bookmarking website that makes it easy to save, share, and explore favorite web pages.
#16. Ma.gnolia (ma.gnolia.com)
Ma.gnolia is another social bookmarking online community that allows users to organize bookmarks, search other people’s favorite bookmarks and make friends.
Video Aggregating Sites:
As its name suggested, user-generated videos are hosted on the below video search sites.
#17. YouTube (www.youtube.com)
YouTube is a user-generated video community web site that was acquired by Google in 2006. It allows users to search and share videos. By far, YouTube has the largest market share among all other video sharing communities.
Promotional Page Submission and Creation Sites:
Below are sites that allow users to create web pages for their businesses or brands.
#18. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)
Wikipedia is by far the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia in the World Wide Web that has been manually and collaboratively created by humans. As of December 2007, it had approximately 9.25 million articles in 253 languages. Human editors have been policing regularly to remove unacceptable contents on Wikipedia.
#19. Squidoo (www.squidoo.com)
Squidoo is a fast and easy way to build a single page (called lens) on a topic. Users can raise money for themselves and charity.
#20. Work.com (www.work.com)
Work.com is a set of how-to-guides for businesses that allows business owners to discover the web’s best solutions for their management problems, from improving search engine marketing for their eCommerce Web site to using the Internet to get everything from business cards or office furniture.
Blog Popularity Sites:
Below are sites that rate blogs.
#21. Technorati (www.technorati.com)
Technorati provides capabilities to rank blogs by popularities and allows real-time search for user-generated blogs by tags or keywords.
Final Words
As Internet marketers, you should avoid at all cost to game the systems not just for ethical reasons. With the high transparency of the web 2.0 and social media sites, spams and rule-breaking activities are too easily to be spotted. Also, marketing via social media and web 2.0 sites is only one possible strategy. It should not replace any of the existing SEO or PPC strategies.
Posted in: Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web 2.0
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