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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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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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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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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You don’t have to spend much time online to realize video is huge. In fact, it’s now the number one means of delivering Internet content. Bloggers are using video more and more, plus there are dozens of social video sharing sites. And the top site for videos, as you know, is YouTube.

We’ve talked about setting up traffic streams, or communication channels (also called outposts), a few times on this blog, and if you haven’t started using video, and YouTube in particular, to deliver some of your content, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. I’m just scratching the YouTube surface with On Blogging Well, but I’ve been doing some research on this topic and wanted to share with you a few things I’ve learned so far.

The purpose of this post is to share with you seven things you may not know about YouTube:

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