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Depends what you are trying to accomplish. I'd venture to guess the ones that are going to give you value while maintaining nofollow links are going to be the more popular ones like everyone has listed here. If you're just looking to build links that pass regular value then you're going to want go after the more obscure ones. Not sure how up to date this list is but here's a page that lists the social media and social bookmarking sites with DoFollow links: http://www.techiemania.com/list-of-65-dofollow-social-bookmarking-sites.html

aka hash bang

One suggestion for who to follow is to listen to the people that SEOMoz trusted for the recent Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011. I've compiled the list of contributors into an easy to follow twitter list: http://twitter.com/#!/darrochreid/seo-insights As you don't care about their eating habits, I also created a filtered version of SEO/Search related updates. This updates each day, so should be more practical: http://paper.li/darrochreid/1308375741 For Web Design I'd follow the following 5 folk: @smashingmag @alistapart @zeldman @Malarkey @paul_irish Enjoy Darroch

Awesome... thanks for the info!

The word "conformity" is not in the google vocabulary.

I usually don't submit my content however, some of my visitors will do that.  Some of my articles will get a big spike of visitors from reddit (a few thousand) but the real traffic for me is from slashdot where I have gotten a hundred thousand visitors over two or three days.  Stumbleupon is also a good traffic source for me but instead of delivering a big spike of traffic I get a steady flow of a hundred to a thousand visitors a day. It takes a really special article or image or other type of content to get massive traffic from these sites.  Most of my content gets very little attention however a few times per year we see the slashdot effect.

Check out this article here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCz5ELUKGBk&NR=1 In it, Rand says that if you have quality fans (or followers in Twitter) who are sharing your stuff then this is helpful: Quantity of Friends/Followers - like links, it's likely the case that more is better, though there will likely be caveats; low quality bots and inauthentic accounts are likely to be filtered (and may be much easier to spot than spammy links, due to the challenge they find in getting any "legitimate" friends/followers). Importance of Friends/Followers - the friends/followers you have, like the link sources you have, are also probably playing a role. Earn high "authority" followers and you yourself must be a high authority person. Analysis of Friends/Followers Ratios - Much like the engines' analysis of the editorial nature of links, consideration of whether a social user is engaging in following/follower behavior purely out of reciprocity vs. true interest and engagement may be part of authority scoring. If you have 100K followers and follow 99K of them, but the engagement between you and your followers is slim, you're likely not as authoritative as an account with 100K followers + 5K following, but those followers are constantly engaged, retweeting, liking, sharing, etc. In my opinion, the most valuable thing you can get from facebook is when people click the like button on your website to share your stuff with their facebook friends.  I think having fans is good - but mostly for social interaction with you and your brand.  I think it helps when someone clicks "like" on a facebook post but I don't think it has a huge impact in the serps.

Thanks Steve - very useful. Jan

Rand talks about URL shorteners and their effect on link juice etc here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-there-anyway-for-redirected-links-to-still-provide-seo-value - Very good info (as you would expect from the bearded one...)

Cheers

Agree with Aaron. Don't create multiple social media accounts just to have them. Make sure you have the manpower to keep each one updated. From experience I can tell you it's a lot of work keeping up with the influencers of many different topics.

You guys are great, Thanks. I'm amazed by your response times and even AddThis came back to me by email in under a minute.

Thanks Ryan I will check it out...

I'm not sure I see the motivation for people to +1 something. For Facebook, social connection is a big motivator: people want their friends to see what they 'like'. How many people actually view other Google profiles like we do Facebook? Why would anyone use the +1 in Google? I think understanding the motivation might be a key to understanding how to leverage it better.

Thank you for the inputs. I fully agree it depends on me and my products - this is why I am asking for ideas to find metrics rather than asking for numbers. Thanks!

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would say this is something that's extremely low on the ranking factors totem pole. Ref new 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors (love this report!!) - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#overview However, something that is high is the number of shares you get, likes you get, interactions with your facebook page that you get, so whichever method agrees more with the browsers your visitors are using, the software you are using to run your site, etc - would be my recommendation.

Ah, so it was me! You are absolutely correct, my apologies. Of course, if you only wish to follow the outgoing tweets from an account you control then there would not be any spam concerns.

thanks for the effort Lewis...I will have another read through the terms...

It is my opinion that video marketing is somewhat ahead of its time, and not worth putting a ton of time, money, or effort into at this point. That includes a service like Tubemogul that ultimately spams social media and video sites with you video. Unless your video is unique enough to become popular, touching or funny enough to become viral, I would only produce videos that would be relevant for my website/blog and visitors.

An example that I saw that worked recently was for a pasta company, and they literally sent out free pasta for every person that signed up.  You ended up having to like and follow their company to sign up as well, so they killed 3 birds with one stone. I found out about it from a "frugal blog" site. It was seriously popular, and it built a following that was specific to the brand and product.  Excellent idea, but probably not the cheapest thing ever done.