Social Media: A Cheat Sheet [Infographic]

Are you new to social media? Are you unsure about how to engage your audience via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the rest? Here’s a handy infographic that doubles as a roadmap of the social Web. Created for CMO.com by 97th Floor, it analyzes the top social media sites in the U.S. and tells you how each one stacks up in terms of:

• Customer communication
• Brand exposure
• Ability to drive traffic to your site
• SEO

Overall, YouTube and Digg post the best results, although YouTube falters in the traffic area and Digg isn’t a great tool for customer communication. This guide doesn’t address the mechanics of how involved you need to be with each site when you launch a new campaign, or how aggressive — in general, it’s important to tread lightly with your messaging because over-marketing in the social sphere can backfire quickly.

The image below has been scaled. You can click on it to see a slightly larger version and download the full-screen PDF.