Social media sites are hot these days, so much so that marketers have tapped well-known sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube to build brand awareness, increase visibility, and possibly sell a product or service.

Considering that most social communities are not receptive to traditional direct or hard sell techniques, an effective campaign will require more subtlety for it to be executed effectively. But given the current boom, which of the thousands of social media sites should marketers target? Search Engine Land columnist Neil Patel (whose column, Let’s Get Social,  is published every Tuesday) shares some useful tips:

1. List out the keywords associated with your website. For example, “Search Engine Land” is probably related to: search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, social media, search engine marketing, etc.

2. Once you have a list of all the major keywords that are related to your website, go through a list of social media sites, select a number that look promising, visit each and search for all of your keywords.
3. With certain social sites you will get tons of results and with others you will get no results. The sites that have few to no results can be crossed off your list and the sites that have tons of results are probably the sites you want to target.

4. Before spending time targeting a site, do a check for competition. Chances are your competition is leveraging the social web. Take the time to search for your competitors’ content on the social sites you’ve selected. Instead of looking to see who has stories submitted on these sites, you need to look at who leveraged what social site successfully. By “successfully” I mean that your competition had a story that received enough votes to go popular or to the homepage of the social media site.

5. The final step helps you decide whether to continue submitting to a particular social media site. Visit all those that allow comments, and see if any users offered an opinion about your website. You shouldn’t always take these comments seriously because many will be a joke, but they should give you an idea of what the users of these social websites think about your website.