This document provides an introduction to various social media platforms and how they can help businesses. It describes platforms such as Behance for creative professionals, Blogger for blogging, Digg and Reddit for social news sharing, Flickr and Slideshare for photo/video hosting, and Wordpress for blogging and publishing. Many platforms can help drive traffic to websites, engage customers, share content, and promote brands.

1. Social Media 201
A Social Media Cheat Sheet

2. Social Media 101: The Ones You Might Know
introduction to the social
media platforms that are
growing in popularity

3. Behance

4. What is it?
Portfolio platform for creative
professionals across multiple design and
marketing industries. It recently gained
compatibility with LinkedIn to provide
portfolio display on profiles.

5. How Can it Help My Business?
Behance is an excellent resource for
individuals in virtually any creative industry.
The search functions available in Behance
provide excellent tools for hiring creative
personnel as well as identifying new trends
and practices in the design industry.

6. Blogger

7. What is it?
Blog-publishing service that allows
private or multi-user blogs with time-
stamped entries. Blogger is currently
owned and operated by Google and
compatible with many Google apps.

8. How Can it Help My Business?
Blogging can serve as an effective
replacement for newsletters as a means
of informing customers of recent
promotions and details about the
company.

9. Digg

10. What is it?
Social news site where users vote stories
“up” or “down” (or “digg up” and “bury”
respectively). Digg's monthly U.S.
unique visits are estimated at 7.2
million.

11. How Can it Help My Business?
Properly utilizing social news sites can
make a business’ site or product go viral;
drastically increasing site traffic and
brand awareness.

12. FriendFeed

13. What is it?
Real-time feed aggregator that
consolidates updates from social media,
social networking, blogging,
microblogging, and social bookmarking
sites.

14. How Can it Help My Business?
Has been used to organize data from
several social media sites into a more
convenient feed for customers and for
internal use for a company.

15. Flickr

16. What is it?
Image and video hosting website, web
hosting suite, and online community.

17. How Can it Help My Business?
As opposed to a standard photo feed on
a company website, Flickr can be a very
effective way to demonstrate products in
a more personal setting.

18. Last.fm

19. What is it?
Social media site dedicated to sharing
and experiencing new music. It builds a
detailed profile of each user's musical
taste by recording details of the songs
the user listens to.

20. How Can it Help My Business?
Customers often recognize businesses in the
music industry that effectively utilize music
social media platforms as credible and
personable organizations (It’s also a great
way to identify potential customers).

21. Netvibes

22. What is it?
Personalized dashboard publishing
platform for the Web including digital
life management, widget distribution
services, and brand observation rooms.

23. How Can it Help My Business?
It can provide a business considerable
internal benefits by conveniently organizing
all relevant information into a single
dashboard.

24. Posterous

25. What is it?
Simple blogging platform that supports
integrated and automatic posting for
Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. It also
contains a multitude of applications for
mobile blogging.

26. How Can it Help My Business?
Posterous’ user-friendly interface and
options for integrating other social
media platforms make it a great tool for
small businesses.

27. Qik

28. What is it?
Mobile live video streaming and two-
way video conferencing application that
allows users to stream live video or
upload recorded video from supported
mobile devices.

29. How Can it Help My Business?
Qik was acquired by Skype, and shares many
of the business functions of Skype. The new
QikSMS service is a great tool for
professionals to send reminders to clients
about appointments (ex: Doctors, hair
stylists, etc.)

30. Reddit

31. What is it?
Social media site very similar to Digg
with the exception of a point-system
unique to Reddit. Users are given
“Karma” based on how many other
people “up-vote” their content.

32. How Can it Help My Business?
Businesses can use Reddit to help establish
its legitimacy by posting engaging and
thoughtful industry and company news.
Because of Reddit’s “karma” point-system,
businesses are openly validated on the
quality of their posts and their expertise.

33. Slideshare

34. What is it?
Online slide hosting service. Slide decks
can be viewed on the site itself and
embedded on other sites. The site has
over 15 million slideshows and one
million registered users.

35. How Can it Help My Business?
Slideshare can be a very effective tool for
spreading brand-awareness. Businesses can
create content, share it, and develop an
open dialogue directly with their customers
and the community.

36. Squidoo

37. What is it?
Community website that allows users to
create pages (called lenses) for subjects
of interest. 50% of Squidoo’s annual
revenue is donated to charitable
organizations around the world.

38. How Can it Help My Business?
Much like any other blogging site, Squidoo is
a great tool for optimizing search engine
results and driving-up web traffic, but
because of the philanthropic nature of the
site, is an especially useful blogging platform
for non-profit organizations and charities.

39. StumbleUpon

40. What is it?
Discovery engine (a form of web search engine)
that finds and recommends web content to its
users. Its features allow users to discover and
rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are
personalized to their tastes and interests using
peer-sourcing and social networking principles.

41. How Can it Help My Business?
Submitting helpful or thought-provoking
information to StumbleUpon opens the
possibility for interested users to directly
reach the material, rank it, and share it
with friends.

42. Technorati

43. How Can it Help My Business?
Internet engine for searching blogs.
Technorati currently indexes 11.8 million
blogs and over 250 million pieces of
tagged social media.

44. What is it?
Businesses that are blogging can take enormous
advantage of Technorati as a tool for promoting
and sharing their blogs. It reaches a very specific
demographic of users, it allows publishers to
anchor their blogs to key words, and it has its
own directory for easy access.

45. Tumblr

46. What is it?
Microblogging platform that allows users
to post text, images, videos, links, quotes
and audio to their tumblelog, a short-
form blog.

47. How Can it Help My Business?
Tumblr is a quickly growing sensation
that is proving to be an excellent way for
businesses to expand their presence.

48. Wordpress

49. What is it?
Open source blogging tool and
publishing platform with many features
including a plug-in architecture and a
template system. WordPress is the
most popular CMS on the Internet.

50. How Can it Help My Business?
Not only can it provide blogging
opportunities for businesses, but it is a
wide-reaching arm to capitalize on
Search Engine Optimization.