Which Social Media Sites Should You Target?

There are hundreds, if not thousands of social media sites. Because there are so many it can be difficult to figure out which ones to target. In an ideal world you would target them all but with limited time it’s important to prioritize. If you are wondering which social sites to target, wonder no more because these 5 steps should answer your question:

Step 1: List out the keywords associated with your website. For example, “Search Engine Land” is probably related to: search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, social media, search engine marketing etc.

Step 2: Once you have a list of all the major keywords that are related to your website, go through a list of social media sites, select a number that look promising, visit each and search for all of your keywords.

Step 3: With certain social sites you will get tons of results and with others you will get no results. The sites that have few to no results can be crossed off your list and the sites that have tons of results are probably the sites you want to target.

You are probably looking at the steps above, realizing that there are only three steps I’ve listed so far. The reason is that the first three steps are technically all you need to figure out what social sites are relevant to your website. The final two steps aren’t necessarily needed, but if you want to improve your odds on doing well in the social web I highly recommend them.

Step 4: Before spending time targeting a site, do a check for competition. Chances are your competition is leveraging the social web. Take the time to search for your competitors’ content on the social sites you’ve selected. Instead of looking to see who has stories submitted on these sites, you need to look at who leveraged what social site successfully. By “successfully” I mean that your competition had a story that received enough votes to go popular or to the homepage of the social media site.

Step 5: The final step helps you decide whether to continue submitting to a particular social media site. Visit all those that allow comments, and see if any users offered an opinion about your website. You shouldn’t always take these comments seriously because many will be a joke, but they should give you an idea of what the users of these social websites think about your website.

Once you have done these final two steps you should be able to come up with a smaller list of social sites that you can focus on. If the list is large, be careful not to overdo it by placing twenty social media buttons on your website. If you control where your visitors go you will be more successful.

If your list is small, make sure you don’t spam or get too aggressive when targeting these sites because if you mess-up you will quickly be left without any social sites to leverage.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.