The hype is still around with social media and it should be by this point, pretty hard to avoid for most major companies. Of course, its not as easy as it looks. It takes a lot more than just submitting a page or site to social sites and absolutely takes a lot more time to build up your reputation. However, it will be well worth your efforts. Gaining a recognizable reputation through your own avatar (usually a personal photo) and name, readers within your industry will gradually jump to opportunities to hear your thoughts, sending thousands of visitors to sites that you mention. Your face will quite literally become an “authority” avatar.

Here’s how you do it:

1/ Find the right social sites - Depending on your interests and website niche market, look for the social network sites that best suit you and the site you want to promote. There a literally hundreds of different social sites out there so don’t go crazy and start joining all the site cause you’ll never have enough time to participate in all of them. My recommendation, participate in 3 social sites, using the same username and avatar. Continue to stay up to date with other social sites though.

2/ Explore the site, understand the ins and outs, abide by the terms and conditions, and familiarize yourself with the type of content. By studying the content, you’ll also gain a fair idea of the type of audience and their personality. Knowing what people read and what reaches the top or home page of social sites, will help you choose the correct content to submit.

3/ Getting involved with the community is the key. Giving valuable feedback to posts, commenting, replying, asking questioning or simply complementing is kick start your social media campaign.

4/ Submit your own material - Share your own posts whether its from your own site or other websites, the idea here is to share as much valuable information as possible to the social site’s community. Ideally you’d want to just submit content from your own site but people aren’t robots, and they will know if you’re constantly spamming your own site just to get traffic.

5/ Vote for other people’s posts if you found it valuable and worth reading. Again, don’t just vote for your own submissions. Other social sites like Yahoo answers don’t have a voting system but similarly, participate in areas you’re good at and respond to questions.

6/ Continue to participate - It might be as simple as step 1-5 but the hardest part for some people, is persisting with this process. It’s almost like link building, scoring points to get to the top of search engines. Similarly, with social sites, you are scoring a reputation, showing others in your industry that you know what your talking about.

Eventually, through hard work, your avatar and name will be like a symbol or logo for your industry. How long it takes for you to get this recognition will depend on your own work. Communities need proof that you’re capable, trust worthy, giving, and reliable before you become an “authority” avatar.