Best Social Media Sites to Promote Your Lens or Article

Social media sites are a great way to share your content online. Whether you create posts on your own blog, lenses on Squidoo, or write for other article sites such as HubPages, sharing your content on social media can help others find it so they can share it with their friends and family, too.

Here's a list of some of the top social media sites where you can share your content online.

(Image credit: logo copyright Pinterest.com)

Where to share your content

Not that long ago, social bookmarking sites were one of the most popular ways to promote your content online. You got a backlink from the site and - if you were lucky - others would find it and vote it up or share it. This Squidoo page actually once had a long list of social boomarking sites that you could use for that purpose.

But life on the Internet is constantly changing and evolving. Google is now looking less favorably on any site that exists mainly for webmasters to get a backlink, and they're favoring sites that are popular among the masses, not just among webmasters. So this page has changed, too.

Rather than offering a list of social bookmarking sites, this page now offers a look at a few of the most popular social media sites. The beauty of using sites such as Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter is that many of your friends and family might also be using these sites, too, so rather than having content seen only by a search engine and other webmasters, your link is much more likely to be seen - and shared - by other real people. Here are 5 social media sites and why you should be using them.

1. Pinterest is a social sharing site that was launched as an invitation-only beta in 2010 and has become wildly popular since then. TechCrunch named it the best new startup of 2011, and Wikipedia says it was generating 11 million visits per week by the end of that year.

Users on Pinterest "pin" photos to topic-based pinboards. The clean graphic interface has definitely charmed many users, although the site has come under a lot of fire over its decision to host full-size images on its own servers, raising copyright concerns. In response, Pinterest added new features that allow users to report others for negative activity and has

Squidoo makes it easy to promote your lenses on Pinterest. Simply sign up for an account and look for the "Pin It" button near the top of your article.

If you want to promote a business on Pinterest, you can also sign up for a business account. Retailers such as HomeDepot and websites such as Etsy and AllRecipes have successfully used Pinterest to increase traffic and sales, and even the presidential candidates created boards during the 2012 elections.

2. Twitter is a micro-blogging site that allows users to send 140-character text "tweets" about whatever's on their mind. It launched in 2006 and now it seems like everybody who's anybody (and even those who aren't) has a Twitter account. Pop stars, politicians , TV personalities and people from all walks of life regularly use on the site. According to Wikipedia, Twitter was handling 340 million tweets per day by early 2012.

It's easy to promote your work on Twitter, especially if you have a WordPress blog, as there are a number of Twitter plugins to automatically tweet your new and old posts. And the nice thing is that you don't need to have a stunning image to grab attention, as you do on Pinterest, nor do you need to come up with lengthy explanations. Simply type a few words, add your URL and tweet it!

3. Facebook probably needs no introduction. This social site started out as a way for university students to interact, but eventually it opened up to anyone over the age of 13 and steamed its way past MySpace to become the most used social site in the world based on monthly active users, according to a January 2009 Compete.com study.

To promote your Squidoo lens on Facebook, look for the Facebook icon near the top of your lens. To promote another site or product on Facebook, you can, of course, also post links on your own profile page, or you can create a Facebook page that can reach interested users without you needing to "Friend" thousands of strangers on your personal profile. You can also join groups to share links. Squidoo lensmasters might want to check out the Squidoo Facebook Community.

4. Tumblr is a popular site that allows users to post content on a short-form blog. As of May 2013, it hosts over 100 million blogs, has more than 75 million new posts created every day, and was recently purchased by Yahoo!

To promote a Squidoo lens or other article(s) on Tumblr, you'll need to sign up for a free account and create your own mini blog.

5. YouTube is one of the top three websites in the world. Started by three friends in November 2005, it grew so quickly that by July 2006, more than 65,000 videos were being uploaded and the site was attracting more than 1 million video views per day. Google purchased the site later that year, and it has continued to grow.

To promote a lens or article on YouTube, you'll need to upload a related video. In the description, you can add a link to your page by writing out the full URL without any HTML, like this: http://www.squidoo.com/facebook-cover-ideas

YouTube will automatically convert the text to a hyperlink.

What happened to the list of bookmarking sites?

As mentioned above, this page used to contain a list of 100 social bookmarking sites with Google PageRank. But over the years, many of the sites went out of business and the data became less and less timely and accurate.

There are still plenty of good social bookmarking sites out there such as Reddit, Digg, Delicious, and Stumbleupon, and if you use them wisely, they can drive traffic to your site. But the key to these sites and other social media sites is to be an active user, not just a link dropper. The days of getting helpful backlinks from hundreds of small bookmarking sites that existed solely for the purpose of generating links for Google to follow are over. Many of these sites still exist, but the value of spending time backlinking from them is now dubious.

(Image of Delicious logo copyright Delicious.com)

Getting to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) isn't easy. If you're new to SEO or just want to learn some new techniques, these search engine optimization books can help you out.

If you've read this far, but still aren't sure what the heck we're talking about, watch this video.

And why should you care when using social bookmarking sites?

PageRank (often abbreviated to PR) is Google's patented way of determining a web page's importance. The PageRank scale goes from 1 - 10, with 10 being highest, and it factors in the quality and quantity of links that point to the page.

Google describes it this way:

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."

If you're using social bookmarking sites simply to recall your favorite pages, PageRank really isn't important. You should simply find a bookmarking site with features you like (Can you organize your bookmarks in folders? Can you highlight text on the site? Is it easy to save pages?).

But if you're a website owner, lensmaster or article writer using social bookmarking to help improve your site or article's searchability, PageRank is important. Google will likely find and index your site much more quickly if you add it to sites that already have PageRank rather than those that don't.

However, new sites are always springing up. A bookmarking service that has no PageRank or indexed links today may be doing very well three months from now. Also, remember that Yahoo!, MSN and other search engines have their own algorithms, so even though a site has only 10,000 links in Google, it may have 100,000 in Yahoo! or vice versa.

For more information about PageRank, check out these resources:

-- SEO expert Danny Sullivan has an excellent article on PageRank on Search Engine Land

-- WebWorkshop has a very comprehensive (and math-intensive) primer on Google PageRank

Let us know your favorite bookmarking site or just say hi! Please note that HTML has been stripped from comments due to excessive spamming.