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Which social media and which shortcuts?

The slow method of working out which social bookmarking services are relevant to your market is to painstakingly research each social bookmarking site to select the ones you think are best for your market. If you’re interested here’s our starter list of about a hundred social bookmarking shortcuts (NB we’ve not visited them all).


This isn’t just a shortcut to selecting social media shortcuts it is the best way; your audience and their habits is what matters - not your suspicions.  Look at the publications addressing your target market.  Here’s an example, we want to find CXOs who are interested in IT.  So to start we’ve selected the FT and CIO technology briefing.  

This immediately gives a shortlist of:



Not perfect but a pretty good start.


So let’s look at the Confederation of British Industry where captains of industry like to speechify:

The CBI offers just just LinkedIn and Twitter.


So looking a little more broadly a daily newspaper The Independent and a business school INSEAD.

The Independent begins to offer two choices with Facebook and is also brave enough to show the count of how many people have bookmarked this page.  


As you might expect from a leading business school, INSEAD is a little more creative add Digg to the shortlist and two well known media sites YouTube where they have their own channel and iTunes so subscribers can listen to interviews with INSEAD’s faculty and business leaders.


So we now have a shortlist of:



This gives a mix of social bookmarking and distribution social media. Looking at this you might want to revisit Facebook and iTunes. Both are associated by some as catering for people’s private life rather than their business life.


The list will also need revisiting every few months; Google+ has only been live since mid 2011 and may yet follow Google Buzz. More positively there is always something new being launched and the next might just be what you need to address your market.  If as in this example you are targeting IT decisions, a wider trawl of IT related sites would also be advisable.


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