There are a multitude of social media sites around and it's important to pick out and focus on a few. Here are the most important:
Twitter is currently the most popular social network for people who produce content. Twitter is known as a microblogging service, and you post status updates or "tweets" that are restricted to an upper length limit of 140 characters. This is just barely long enough to hold very abrupt conversations, link to posts, and complain about things.
The power of Twitter for content producers is in the Retweet. This is when someone duplicates someone else's tweet to transmit it to their own followers. Sometimes individual tweets can get retweeted enough to effectively go viral and the resulting traffic can be significant.
The best chance to get retweeted comes if you have been consistently delivering valuable tweets to your followers and building the habit of retweeting with them. It's also great to retweet other people's links from time to time so that they return the favor.
The StumbleUpon service allows you to explore new sites randomly within your areas of interest. Stumblers then press a thumbs-up or thumbs-down button to let StumbleUpon know what they thought of the site. The more positive reviews a site gets, the more likely it is that StumbleUpon will send their users there when they press the "Stumble!" button.
The key to using StumbleUpon effectively is to select categories carefully and experiment with the relevant options. Because Stumblers tell the service what their categories of interest are, you have a better chance of success when you select a highly targeted category.
To many, Facebook is a social network for keeping in touch with friends and family. Companies are now setting up Pages for themselves or their products and using Facebook as a promotional outlet. Thanks to Facebook sharing widgets that you can embed on your blog, audiences are slowly beginning to share links.
The traffic that Facebook can send can be significant if your link appears in the right place. The Psdtuts+ blog that I work on occasionally has links published on the official Adobe Photoshop page on Facebook, and every time this happens we receive a solid 5,000–6,000 visitors!
While for most bloggers, Digg is increasingly difficult to get on, it can still benefit sites enormously when a post gets frontpaged. Digg is a social news site, which means news, blog posts, funny pictures, or other content types are submitted by a user, and their level of humor or usefulness is evaluated by other Digg users and they vote it up or down.
If enough users vote the content up, it appears on the frontpage of the site. The amount of traffic Digg can send varies depending on the post topic and the difficulty of getting frontpaged is extremely high. If you can manage it though, the rewards are great!
Reddit is a site very similar to Digg but with the added dimension of sub-Reddits. These are like mini sub-sites with niche focuses like "Apple," "games," "tech," and so on. Getting traffic from a sub-Reddit is significantly easier than getting frontpaged on Digg or Reddit, making them a good place to start experimenting with social news marketing.
The more targeted the audience you promote your material to, the better. This is why social news sites that focus on a specific topic are so useful and why sub-Reddits are great. Such niche social news sites have the great potential to deliver smaller, but more focused traffic doses as compared to Digg or Reddit.
Some topic-specific social news sites include Sphinn for search engine news, Tipd for stock market posts, Showhype for entertainment, DesignMoo for web design, DZone for development, and Hacker News for entrepreneurship. Search around and you'll find a variety of niche social news sites with great potential for delivering solid doses of traffic without, the difficulties of getting frontpaged that a site like Digg entails.
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