A Cheat Sheet to Help You Conquer Social Media

It is impossible to ignore the sphere of social media anymore. Jump on the train or get run over!

Marketers who are still a little unsure about charting their path through the choppy waters of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn could do worse than check out this handy little guide to making social media work for them. The CMO's guide to the social landscape, created for CMO.com by client 97th Floor, takes all the major social media sites in the U.S. and analyzes their capabilities in four sectors: customer communication, brand exposure, driving traffic to your site, and SEOs. (For the full-sized version, click here.)

Overall, it's YouTube and Digg that post the best results, although the former falls down on the traffic question, while the latter fails on customer communication. One thing that the cheat sheet neglects to mention, however, is how deeply you need to go into each Web site when launching a new campaign. It's pretty obvious that a softly-softly approach can get your message across on the social media. But if you over-market your product, it's un-friending all the way.

BY Addy DugdaleThu Mar 11, 2010