The Importance of Social Media promotionIt is widely heard in the Internet space that Social Media promotion is indispensable. Social Media promotion strategy was widely used in the 2008 United States election cycle. The election candidates (Reigning Barack Obama) used the Social media promotion strategy to organize campaigns, announce events and connect to the followers. Statistics indicate that Barack Obama has used this Social Media strategy widely than others to connect to his audience. Hence Social Media played an important role in Barack Obama’s victory. Not only for election cycles, Social Media is the best for business promotion too. You will be well aware of the fact that social media is the most crowded place in the Internet and hence it is the best place to promote your products, announce product launches, and connect to your customers worldwide and to grab universal attention. Considering the importance of Social Media promotion, SIM team has filtered out the best Social media websites. Filtration was done based on the key factors like:1. Customization options2. Importance in Business Promotion3. Social Media Activity 4. User Ratings WordPressOverall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank: 9Every blogger will be aware of wordpress.com. With free registration, lots of customization options and very easy user interface, wordpress.com is the best Social Media website available today. The important thing to be noted with wordpress is that you can have an advertisement free blog. Wordpress.com doesn’t load your blog with tons of ads. Moreover, wordpress is the only social media site that allows you to track your promotion status without the need of adding third party applications.Basic FeaturesUse of Template, Availability of Plug-ins/ Widgets, Text Editor, HTML Editor, Preview, Link, Sidebar/Navigation Options, Archive, Profile/Bio, RSS Feeds, and Comments BloggerOverall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank:8View SampleBlogger from Google tails wordpress in the Social Media ratings. Launched as early as 1999, Blogger was bought by Google in the year 2002. The popularity of blogger rose as soon as Google took control over it. As blogger is owned by the search engine giants, it is preferred by most of the people. Moreover, blogger makes it easy to integrate Google adsense and other Google products to your blog. The recently launched social networking Gadget, Google Friend connect can be added to blogger with ease. You can also get tons of free blogger templates from the web for customization. You can use the HTML editor and many other in-built gadgets to customize your blog. The disadvantage of blogger is that you have to install your own tracking tools to track the visitors.Basic FeaturesUse of Template, Availability of Plug-ins/ Widgets, Text Editor, HTML Editor, Preview, Link, Sidebar/Navigation Options, Archive, Profile/Bio, RSS Feeds, and CommentsAdditional FeaturesPhoto Album/Gallery, Audio, video, Pays for Google Ads/Affiliates and Polls Squidoo Overall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank: 8View SampleSquidoo has gained great popularity through the recent years. The Squidoo posts popularly known a squidoo lenses appear consistently in the search engine results. Hence creating squidoo lenses is indispensable for business promotion. Though we cannot use third party templates, there are many inbuilt customization options available. The widgets available in squidoo called modules are excellent tools for customization. Basic FeaturesAvailability of Plug-ins/ Widgets (modules), Text Editor, Link, Sidebar/Navigation Options, Archive, Profile/Bio, RSS Feeds, and CommentsAdditional FeaturesAudio, video, and Polls HubPagesOverall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank: 6Squidoo and Hubpages are a buzzword in today’s Social Media world. With thousands of good quality posts, Hubpages is the trustworthy source where many people seek information. Creating a profile in HubPages can get your business exposed to many people worldwide. Followed by simple and free registration, you can create you own customized profile and start posting the articles. By creating hubs or article posts, which are somewhat akin to a blog but not exactly so, one can share their articles and write-ups while getting an opportunity to earn through affiliates links like Google, eBay and Amazon. XangaOverall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank: 7View SampleXanga is well known among the Social Media users as it supports videos, images, and music. It also offers great customization options (not flexible as blogger and wordpress). With little knowledge in HTML editing, you can make your profile look unique from others. The basic free registration places Google ads in the posts. There is a paid option which is ad free. However, the Xanga blogs rarely appear in the search engine results. Hence Xanga is perfect for personal blogging. For business purposes Xanga is not upto the mark. StumbleUponOverall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank: 8View SampleStumbleUpon is a popular social bookmarking website. Achieving great exposure through social media is just a breeze with the help of Stumbleupon. Though the stumble upon blogs lack customization options it is perfect for Business promotion through social media. There are no gadgets or widgets that can be added t your profiles. The popularity of StumbleUpon in social bookmarking makes it indispensable to have a Stumbleupon profile for Business promotion TumblrOverall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank: 8View SampleTumblr is yet another Social Media site that has great customization options. Unique profiles can be created with the use of the HTML editor (has some bugs too). Though there are many customization options and possibilities to add videos and pictures, the interface is very confusing. The videos that appear in the preview is some how lost in the actual post. The free and easy registration and the option to add custom HTML templates make tumblr to get the 7th place. EasyJournalOverall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings View SamplePage Rank: 5EasyJournal is a PR 5 Social media site with little customization options. EasyJournal has no widgets or gadgets to personalize your profile. Hence EasyJournal is good for business promotion rather than personal blogging. The very few customization options include the use of inbuilt templates. The easiness of setting up the profile and the pagerank makes EasyJournal to be in the 8th position BlogoMonsterOverall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank: 5View SampleBlogoMonster is a little know, professional looking social media website. Blogomonster has a PR of 4. Like any other social media website below the #5 rankings in this list, BlogoMonster allows the use of inbuilt templates alone. However, the ad-free profile looks very neat, professional and catchy. There are some cool features like chat, videos and music, though there is no option to add widgets. Blog.com Overall Rating Customization options Importance in Business promotion Social Media Activity User Ratings Page Rank: 6View SampleWith a PR of 6, blog.com is preferred by most of the Internet marketers for business promotion. HTML editing makes it possible to customize the profiles according to our wish. Still no widgets for added customization! However, due to the lack of a Social media buzz in blog.com, it is pulled to the 10th place of the rankingBottom lineCreating a blog/micro website in these social media sites can get more exposure to your business online. You can post your articles to these profiles and make it highlight in the search engine results so that your website can get quality back links from the. These standings are based on the statistics of the year 2008 and likely to change soon. Subscribe to this news to stay updated with the list.