Flickr: 24 Tips to Get You Started

Old photo album from 1950's with black and white photos in foreground

Photo-sharing is a great tactic to add to your online marketing strategy. Flickr is a popular photo-sharing community where you can showcase your products and services. Here are 24 tips to help you get started:

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StumbleUpon Your Target Audience

wet floor sign

A couple of weeks ago, I listed 23 types of social media sites and mentioned that StumbleUpon defied definition. It’s not your typical social bookmarking site. StumbleUpon is a unique site that is part social-networking community and part personalized recommendation engine and allows users to “channel surf” the web. “Stumblers” set preferences to discover online content, and then give returned sites a thumbs up or thumbs down, which tightens one’s personal search parameters.

The more you stumble and vote, the more attuned to your likes and dislikes StumbleUpon will become. And the same goes for your target audience. This means that StumbleUpon actually delivers niche-targeted traffic to your site. And, that traffic isn’t just niche-targeted, these visitors are actively seeking certain content topics. Pretty cool.

Besides being a great place to discover great content and market your own stuff, StumbleUpon is fun. Here’s how it works:

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23 Types of Social Media Sites

White RSVP draped with a red ribbon

It’s easier to navigate the maze of online social media sites if you understand the different site categories and the purpose of each type. The social media world consists of two segments: social and media. To optimize your experience with each type of social media, it’s best to participate in the communities you choose to join.

Today’s post supplies a list of 23 types of social media, including a brief explanation of the purpose and at least one example of each type. This list will help you determine which types of social media sites would best benefit your situation. Nearly all social media sites offer free memberships.

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Social Media Etiquette: 18 Tips

Antique Etiquette Book

Despite the waning popularity of respect in today’s society, the online community tends to enforce a set of unwritten “rules” of social media. Those who ignore or blatantly break these rules will be punished either by being exiled into the land of de-friend/un-follow or publicly blasted for rudeness (yes, that seems a bit hypocritical, but it happens). Before we delve too deep into our social media series, let’s take a few minutes to go over a few ways to make new friends and keep the old.

The Golden Rule of social media is — “Give More than You Receive.” All relationships are give and take, but statistics have proven that those who give online far more than they take gain the respect of others, which in turn spreads their influence and grows their communities. In my free report “Taming the TwitterBeast in 20 Minutes a Day,” I briefly mentioned a suggested 7-1 ratio of information tweets to personal promotion tweets. People who tweet one link after another that leads directly to a sales page are quickly unfollowed. That ratio seems to be a pretty good guideline, not only for Twitter, but for all social media platforms.

If someone were to write the Social Media Book of Etiquette, it would include the following 18 tips:

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Social Media: What’s Your Game Plan?

Photo of a strategical football play designed in a sketch book.

No coach who hopes to win a game will take his team on the field without first constructing a game plan. Before we step into the social media stadium, we bloggers also need to develop a social media game plan. Remember, a strategy is an overall plan, and tactics are the means used to implement that plan. Before we get into social media tactics, let’s first get our social media game plan going.

There are many things to consider when planning our social media strategy:

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