Editor’s Note: We all want to go to the SMX Social Media confab in New York next week. But good conferences don’t come cheap, especially if they’re in the Big Apple. But not to worry. We know people. Like Rand Fishkin, who is giving a talk on Social Media Marketing Essentials. As one of the smarteratti, Rand knows that driving more visits to your site can mean more clicks on your ads from more qualified prospects. Driving more visits is a good thing. Driving more visits for no money is even better. In his SMX conference presentation, Rand will discuss how to get more clicks via Social Media. He offers a preview here (for no money).

The buzz about social media has reached a crescendo. Naturally, this has sparked a good deal of debate and trial and error around the practices of marketing across social media on the web. Results, from successes (which we often don’t hear much about) to failures (which seem to get the most press) dot the landscape of social media marketing and inspire both curiosity and fear in website owners and marketers.

Today, I’d like to act as Sergeant Joe Friday and present, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Social media marketing may be a bit of a minefield, but it’s also an exceptional opportunity for marketers to reach a traditionally tough-to-penetrate demographic—early adopters. This is the fundamental reason that social media marketing is so exciting—those who are active in social networks are powerful people—they’re influencers, bloggers, journalists, thought leaders and publishers. They can help to spread your message, so reaching them can have a remarkable impact.

So… How does social media marketing work? In many, many different ways. You can use social media marketing to:

• Create profiles on social media sites to conduct reputation management and control (You can see what others say about your brand and actively prevent your brand name from being abused—i.e. the John McCain MySpace scandal)
• Participate in social media networks to earn credibility and mindshare from other members of those communities
• Share stories, links and content that the community will find valuable, which sends either a positive branding message or direct traffic to your company
• Build links to your website to help with traffic and organic search rankings by building content on social media sites
  Control the search results by using profile pages to fill up the search results (and push down potential negative results)
  Distribute viral content you’ve created to help attract links, traffic and attention (see this post on linkbaiting for more)

Each of these unique activities requires considerable effort, know-how and experience. It also requires that you know where to go to engage in social media marketing. These are the top 10 sites we engage with and get value from:

StumbleUpon—With more than three million regular users, StumbleUpon drives terrific traffic and has social options that help to make it even more powerful
Wikipedia—Incredible visibility in search engines and a powerful brand make participation valuable
Yahoo! Answers—with three million users and growing, Answers is a natural fit for any company seeking to build its brand and expose its experts to the curious
Digg—The Digg home page drives tens of thousands of visitors and considerable visibility to the larger blogosphere
Reddit—Similar to Digg, but with an older, somewhat more mature audience focused on politics & offbeat news
del.icio.us—Tag pages, the home page and the popular page are all valuable for driving traffic and branding
Flickr—One of the best sources on the web for sharing images and a highly participatory community as well
Newsvine—Recently picked up by MSNBC, Newsvine allows for unrivaled levels of participation and content generation
Yelp—The current leader in local reviews and listings
YouTube—The powerful, highly visible video site has millions of active users and allows for incredible brand reach when a video becomes popular

The best recommendation I can give is to spend time in these social communities, learn the ins-and-outs of the people and participants and jump in only when you feel comfortable engaging. For many publishers, this may require a social media specialist (either in-house or contracted) or someone who can dedicate the time to learning the landscape of social media. If you’d like to learn more, a good recommendation would be to stop by the SMX Social Conference in New York City next week, and be sure and look in at my presentation on social media marketing essentials as well Patrick McGee’s  session on Yahoo! Answers.

Best of luck on all your social media adventures!

—Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

Do Want to Know More?
So do we. That’s why we’ve been running an ongoing series on low-cost traffic drivers to help our publishers get more users and help increase qualified clicks. Check out these previous posts:

Optimizing for Social Media

SMM in Depth

Working the Media

Boost Your Buzz

Optimizing for Relevancy

Leveraging Linkbait