At Social Media Systems we’ve been discussing how to build out a healthy blogroll, both to aid our visitors, provide valuable content, and to enhance our social media marketing campaigns.
We decided to put a post up for each of our blog authors allowing them to share the resources they use the most with the rest of the world and then put these lists in the traditional blog roll area. Each list will be complete with descriptions of why the author finds each resource worthy of attention. Here is my list of top social media marketing resources:
Top Social Media Marketing Resources: (I will update and grow this page constantly)
Activerain – social networking profiles and blog for Realtors and vendors 
Most people do not notice that you do not need to be a Realtor to join, you can be a vendor like me, and the profiles and blogs are not bad for Search Engine Placement link-building campaigns.
Alexa – Traffic and Website Statistics and Archived Information and Reviews
An Amazon.com company, we use it to get quick information about any website according to everyone who has the Alexa toolbar – which collects a wealth of information and statistics. They also archive old websites, and provide links to reviews on amazon.com.
Associated Content – Associated Content is a buyer and seller, syndicator of user-generated, user-filtered content
One of the most successful and well traveled sites on the web, this site is a must for branding and link building: your clout and pagerank build as an author – you can even get paid for content, although that is not what I use it for.
Delicious – social bookmarking, link-sharing
You install a toolbar that allows you to keep a set of favorites online where you can access them from any computer, and share them with the world, if you like, as an online resource. Excellent for traffic building and link-popularity, I recommend that you add and use the toolbar.
Digg.com – social bookmarking popularity-driven site:
This site is great for traffic-building for your articles and blogs, and also for link-popularity for your main site and blog: users submit, describe, review, and rank each others preferences. It is also great for getting real-time feedback on what people actually like and do not like about what you and/or others who write stuff that you read may have to say.
Feedburner – a feed aggregator that allows you to monitor various statistics about your feeds,
make them available in every format to your visitors, even sell advertising fed into the feed.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool – find out what words are searched for, and how much competition there is to rank for those words
To use it intelligently, you must understand the concept of pack mentality: we track trends in key industries like real estate and get to where the market is going first; many Realtors search daily for the same things, but they are not always each others target market – so be careful how you interpret the results from such tools.
Google Analytics Account – track everything through Google:
Again, it is essential that you understand that maketing is not just about what is happening right now, but also about what is changing, and what is about to happen; that being said, these are the most reliable numbers about your website, who visits it, what page they enter on, what page they exit on, and a wealth of other information.
Linkedin – most well-known business-to-business social networking site
Linkedin was originally for job and employment placement services – it is a very full-featured business-to-business networking site.
Mybloglog.com – Blog syndication, networking, tracking, resources, and communities
Everyone with a blog should be here, and I highly recommend some of their tools, like the one that lets you see who has read this lately at the right of this page! I visit and network with them!
Myspace.com – the most well known social media site
If you thought is was just for kids, think again: the average age is over forty, and a profile here can be used for link-popularity and business networking, not just dating and file sharing!
Onlywire.com – multiple social bookmarks with one click!
It will take you a while to do this, but it wil then allow you to bookmark files in several places building traffic in one click!
Stumbleupon – another social bookmarking site very useful for traffic building:
Technorati.com – a blog, news and file sharing aggregator
Another must for bloggers: you can tag your posts and make them available to millions by keyword search
Yahoo360 – Yahoos little known stab at social media profiles – pretty usefull and feature rich
One of the most underused, unknown resources: Yahoo360 offers a feature rich social media site for free, complete with RSS feed importation and other nice features, very use-friendly.
Zoodango – Seattle-based business networking Social Media Site
Like linkedin.com, you build a profile used for business-to-business networking
We routinely submit our clients to over 3000 different places, and build many profiles in our link-building campaigns, and the list is constantly growing: I will add to this list of the best social media resources regularly: maybe you should bookmark it!
