It is no secret that one of the key points to Social Media is community. People in real life, like to affiliate themselves with affinity groups based on racial and residential origin, interest, activity or occupation. Some social media platforms where communities aggregate are blogs and forums. Most successful blogs produce content on a given category or umbrella of topics. Message boards often serve communities who share a common interest or activity. Question and Answer Sites answer questions usually on all ranges of topics, but organize the questions into categories for easier searchability.

This is why blogs, forums and question and answer sites are a great place to ‘socialize’, mingle, make virtual friends and get the word out about your business. There are a lot of good blog search engines that will help you find good blogs to post blog comments on – some of them are blogsearch.google.com, blogcatalog.com, technorati.com, and blogflux.com. I suggest that you read through the blog post, make sure it is relevant to your message and post a blog comment that either adds to the content or gives relevant feedback. Of course you would want to add a link back to your website.

Messageboards are also a great place to spread the message about your business. A great messageboard search engine is Omgili.com, which gives you search results that are relevant to your searched keyword. Make sure you jump in when the water is warm, meaning warm up to the message board first before you post messages that promote your website. Say ‘Hi!” in the newbie section, respond to a other people’s questions and make sure your are a valuable contributing member to the messageboard.

Question and Answer sites is a great platform to leverage primarily because users of these sites, such as answers.yahoo.com and answerbag.com, are looking for solutions to problems through asking questions. For example, in Yahoo! Answers members ask about the best products to use for a specific need, best places to go to for certain services, or to learn about new websites that can can help them. You can use the Yahoo! Answers search function to search for relevant questions. Craft helpful answers and post a link to your website, presenting your product or service as a solution to the question.