As I mentioned in 

The Weakest Link – Your Social Media Marketing “Killer App” social media tools empower you, using tools that are largely
free, to maximize your business’ exposure and interaction, connecting and staying in touch more often and with more people than you ever
could before.
Now I’d like to talk about how. How does one do this? It all starts with knowing which tools are most useful for your business. In fact I’m often
asked “what are the best online marketing tools for small businesses?”. I’ll save that question for another post. For now let’s focus on a
subset of that – what are the best social media marketing tools for small businesses?
First let’s take stock. Here is a list of some of the most popular social media tools (at least in the US market, in other countries it’s a different
story mind you). I want to give a nod to Seattle based Creativetechs for doing the thinking and the legwork to gather these sites into tidy
categories!
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Social Tools
Directories:
LinkedIn
Facebook
MySpace
Friendster
Hi5
Google Profiles
Social Bookmarking:
Digg
Delicious
Stumbleupon
Reddit
Newsvine
FriendFeed

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Video Sharing:
YouTube
Blip.tv
Vimeo
Metacafe
Stickam
Photo Sharing:
Flickr
Fotolog
SmugMug
Zoomr
Photobucket
Webshots
Blogging:
Wordpress
Twitter
Typepad
All of these tools enable you to interact with people but in each group a different kind of content is the focus.
Social Directories – in some ways the simplest because it is the content focus is YOU. Each individual creates a profile and the directory
enables you to find and connect with people based on the information they supply about themselves in that profile. This has extended
beyond individuals to “entities”. So that a company or group can also create a profile. Which brings me to one of the most confusing things
 about these directories – that not all of them approach “entities” the same way and most of them don’t make it very easy to figure out how to
create a profile for your entity. Facebook invites you to create a Facebook “page” for your business but does not want you to create a
“profile” for your business even though pages and profiles can use many of the same features and tools (but not all). On the other hand,
LinkedIn has a very limited “page” for businesses providing very limited functionality. Small businesses often struggle to figure out which kind
of existence they should have in these directories (should it be me? Should it be my company? Should it be someone else within my
company?) both to stay within the terms of service and still maximize the tools marketing potential.
Related Articles by
Maisha:
The Weakest Link –
Your Social Media
Marketing “Killer
App”
The Marketing Skills
You Can Learn from
Obama
Social Bookmarking (also called Link Sharing) – these tools allow you to highlight and share individual Web pages you like by sharing a link
to them. People can “vote” on each link that has been shared and the links with the most votes move to the top of the page making the site a
portal to the “best” content as filtered by the community. Note that an individual profile is connected to the posting of each link so over time
you can get to know your fellow bookmarkers by their sharing habits, genre, frequency etc. These sites are useful if you post a lot of content
and would like that content to be found and read by more people.
Video Sharing – sites like YouTube are usually very straightforward in functionality. They make it very easy to upload your own video and
once the video is uploaded, it is also easily viewed and commented on by others. YouTube also provides ways for the video to be shared
and embedded in other sites increasing their ability to turn “viral”. Because video can be far more useful for branding than for sales, and
because small businesses often do not have access to the budgets or marketing expertise to leverage the benefits of viral video, this tends
to be a useful tool only when the business has ready and very easy access to a good quality video writing, production and editing resource
that is willing to work for free or at low cost (i.e. close friend, owner, family member).
Photo Sharing – these sites are usually quite simple in functionality. Members can post photos which then can be viewed and commented
on by the general public or only by those who are invited to see them. Small businesses sometimes use these sites to share photo galleries
instead of building photo gallery capability into their own Web site. I think this usually poses a branding and user experience conflict.
Especially since photo galleries are usually pretty inexpensive ($300 or less) to integrate into one’s own site.
Blogging – the content is your creativity, your voice. You post content on a regular basis whether it’s text, video, photos, podcasts or all of
the above. Blogs enable you to be an individual publisher, and usually enable readers to participate in the conversation by posting
comments.
Out of all of these tools, the top 3 in my list perhaps will not be a surprise:
 Facebook
 Twitter
 LinkedIn
Next time I’ll go into more detail about each and why I prefer these tools for small businesses.
I also am fond of blogging (go figure!) but that deserves to be covered separately.
Also from time to time I host live workshops on social media and other Internet marketing and Web site topics for small business

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