How to Avoid Trolls, Landmines, and Time-Sucks in Social Media

The social media landscape can be a Labyrinth for even the most seasoned marketing professionals.

Unexpected landmines, spiteful trolls, and productivity black holes are commonly spotted – that is if you’ve got the foresight to see them.

And if you don’t? Well, you’re not totally out of luck as long as you have access to the Internet and a full-color printer.  CMO.com just released their second-annual “CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape,” and it’s as useful as it is colorful.

In it they examine 9 important social media properties (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Tumblr) and evaluate each respective network’s value in terms of customer communication, brand exposure, traffic-driving ability, and SEO.

The winners in each quadrant?

Click this image to go to CMO.com for the downloadable version (PDF)

The Best Social Media for Customer Communication:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Tumblr

Not surprisingly, these massively popular social media sites are great for connecting with your audience, mostly because your audience tends to already be there. Be careful though about becoming too dependent on any one of these sources.

Why? Because if this chart was done 5 years ago, there would be very different names listed here. Who knows what it’ll look like in 5 more?

The Best Social Media for Brand Exposure:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Digg
• Tumblr

The same logic applies here. You’ll definitely want to fish where the fish are, but make sure you have a hut to take your catch back to.

The Best Social Media for Driving Traffic to Your Site:

• Digg
• StumbleUpon

Both of these sources can work to drive traffic, but be prepared for a high bounce-rate, low engagement, and in a short duration. These sites are also known for putting a considerable strain on servers, but the nature of these visitors is to look once and leave. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll earn a link.

SEO:

• Flickr
• YouTube
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Tumblr

Don’t count on any of these sites as the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Though they can help to get your pages indexed faster by Google, you’re better off creating content that appeals to humans, who will in turn share your content in these networks rather than trying to create content for these networks to appeal to humans. Know what I mean?

But don’t take my word for it, check out the rest of the chart here.

[image: akunamatata]