Social Media Sharing Platforms
We have called them sharing platforms, but they could equally be called collaboration or content distribution platforms as these sites are designed to both let you share what you like and also discover content that you might like.
If we reverse that logic round to your business site, we want people to bookmark you in Delicious, or perhaps list your article on Digg as an interesting news story. Why? Because this creates more links to your site, and more links is good for your Search Engine rankings. The bookmarks etc also provide additional traffic to your site, and as they are on message this means that the visitors will be targetted.
You may not have come across these type of sites, so we’ll give a brief outline of the ones we think are important – as of today!
Social Media Bookmarking – Delicious
Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. Delicious will also show you the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, their search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like you.
Folders were the old way to organize your bookmarks. They were great if you only had a few bookmarks and a few folders, but as your collection grew, it became harder and harder to decide what goes where. Delicious has a new and better way: tags.
Tags are simply words you use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. This means, for example, that all of the bookmarks you tag with funny and video will automatically be placed in the “funny” collection and the “video” collection. Since tags work the same way for everyone, you can also check out other people’s “funny” or “video” bookmarks. You can even combine tags to see bookmarks with funny and video.
For instance, if you find a recipe online that is both French and vegetarian, simply tag it with “french” and “vegetarian”. As your collection of bookmarks grows, you’ll see this bookmark on your ‘vegetarian’ tag page as well as your ‘french’ tag page. This is also a great way to share your knowledge with friends- as every tag page has an easy to remember URL that you can send on to interested parties.
Part of Social Media Marketing is giving something away. Delicious is a great way to do this. Let’s assume that you are a search engine company – you might save all of the sites you use for research on SEO with the tag set to “SEO” – if you allow this list to be public, you are now providing your users with a fantastic resource that will save them loads of time. They should also remember that YOU gave them the information and may therefore come back for advice in the future.
Social Media Sharing – Digg
Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg shows the best stuff as voted on by their users.
They don’t have editors at Digg — they provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content so changing the way people consume information online. How do they do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by the community (that would be you, or your customers). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of their visitors to see.
And it doesn’t stop there. Because Digg is all about sharing and discovery, there’s a conversation that happens around the content. Digg promotes that conversation and provide tools for their community to discuss the topics that they’re passionate about. By looking at information through the lens of the collective community on Digg, you’ll always find something interesting and unique. They are “committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing”.
Social Media Sharing – Stumbleupon
StumbleUpon helps you and your customers discover and share great websites – which will be yours of course! As you click 
Stumble!, they deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 8 million+ other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like (
) automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.
StumbleUpon uses 
/ 
ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded stumblers (
) have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine.
The objective for your website is to get it found by Stumblers, so without repeating the obvious yet again, you need GREAT CONTENT that people want to share.
Social Media Sharing – Reddit
Reddit is similar to Digg, although not as popular! Reddit is a social news site allowing users to submit articles, vote on them, and engage in discussions. Like other social news websites, Reddit is divided into categories. In addition to being able to vote for and against articles, Reddit users receive karma for submitting popular articles.
Reddit is a good place to find popular articles and engage in discussions. It is also a good place to market your own blog by submitting your articles.
Bespoke Social Media – Culture Colony
Bespoke Social Media – Kiribu