With all of the self proclaimed “social networking experts” out there it is hard to decide who to believe and trust. Most of them want money from you in trade for what they call their “experience”. However what makes me smile is that almost none of these people have any business experience at all. If they do, it’s not any experience that has yielded something they could brag about. How does one decide who to trust to direct your business in the most public display of communication that your company has ever engaged in? Which social media sites do you participate in and why? To be an expert in something you must have experience. I have never found that one person has had all of the right answers.

For years now I have been using these sites to build SEO for my websites and expand my personal brand. I have been posting articles to StumbleUpon and Digg for years and have seen great results, posting images to Flickr and communicating through Twitter and Facebook. These sites have been huge contributors to the traffic many of my websites receive. There are many different social media websites, each of them with a different purpose.

While browsing around online I came across a single PDF Roadmap that explains everything in plain english. You can download a large PDF here (right click, save target/file as). Drew McLellan put this beautiful breakdown together and it’s content is very sound. As I explained before, different social media sites help with different functions of your purpose and brand. Use it to figure out where to post which types of media for the best results.

It is not rocket science, it just takes someone to put it all together in plain english. If you do not have accounts on these websites, get them. If your website is not set up with buttons such as the buttons you see below for sharing content, then contact your website designer and have them added. Encourage your readers to share your content if they enjoyed it. And please for the love of all that is sacred, stop encouraging the talking heads out there, take initiative and do it yourself.

Finding tools like the CMO Social Landscape help me continue to get better at promoting myself, my business and the content I create.

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