Something hit me several weeks ago as I was preparing to speak to the Women Business Owners of Michiana. There is an easy way to understand social media sites without getting technical and using a lot of buzzwords like “microblog.” Social media sites fall into three simple categories:

Connection Centric

Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace all focus on who you know. The goal is to connect with friends and business contacts. Conversations happen because members of these sites have common interests or histories.

Conversation Centric

Places like Twitter, Identi.ca and even old school discussion forums and mailing lists are where the community is all about the conversation. People connect for one simple reason: they want to talk about what is being talked about.

Sharing Centric

Sites where you share talent or expertise like Flickr, YouTube, Scribd and SlideShare. Sharing centric networks let you share what you do or what you know and the networking and conversation happens because of what you share.

What drives success on each of these kinds of networks is directly related to the the category they fall in:

Connection Centric: Quantity and quality of your contacts drive network growth. Want to get the little 500 icon on LinkedIn? Invite more people with common ground to connect.
Conversation Centric: Quality and quantity of your contribution to the conversation drive network growth. Growing your followers on Twitter is easy: just tweet more often about things that people like.
Sharing Centric: Again, quality and quantity of what you share drives your network’s growth. Want more followers on Digg? Either post more interesting links or post more often.

About the Author: Mike Seidle
Mike Seidle is a leading Internet marketing strategist and has been helping companies with search engine optimization and developing cost effective Internet marketing strategies since 1998. Mike is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service and currently serves on Professional Blog Service's board of directors.

Tags: social networking, social networks

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Social Media, Social Networks, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.