48 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities

http://www.doshdosh.com/list-of-social-media-news-websites/

I recently wrote a beginners guide to social news websites and this article follows up on that by offering a list of the social news websites you can use to get information and web traffic.

There are a great deal of social news sites on the internet, sometimes too many. Most of them are dormant and are no longer active, largely because they were poorly marketed and hence, never had an active community of users in the first place.

For instance, this webpage has a list of over 380 social news sites (http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/04/all-digg-style-applications-list.html). Most of them are a waste of your time: they are riddled with spam or are so ill-promoted that they’ll never attract a critical mass of viewers or social news participants.

You don’t have a lot of time on your hands. You want a community that gives you fresh news on topics you care about. You want something that sends prospects and traffic while branding your website or business. You want a social news site with a long term returns on investment. Here’s a list of some of them.

40+ Social News Websites: Notes about this list

I spent some time going through hundreds of social news sites and came up with a list of sites which I think are worth exploring. Each site on this list is evaluated according to various criteria, including the no. of votes for each story and the frequency/date of submissions, all of which are indicators of user/viewer activity.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive. It doesn’t include every social news website out there but only the ones which I think has potential for providing you with relevant/fresh news while giving exposure to your ideas, brand or website.

Some of the sites on this list have a broad topical focus while others are created to cater to a specific niche. I’ve divided the list into two portions: General Social News or websites which cover a wide variety of news and Niche Social News which refers to specialized sites that only focus on a limited range of niche topics.

This list purely consists of English social news sites. There are no social bookmarking or social network sites included. I’ve not included video sharing sites because I’ll be writing more on them and video marketing in a future article.

Here’s a brief definition of social news sites, in case you’re unfamiliar with them:

Social News websites are communities which allow its users to submit news stories, articles and media (videos/pictures) and share them with other users or the general public. Some of these articles will be given more visibility, depending on various factors such as the number of user votes for each item.

Apart from counting registered user votes, some social news websites employ human editors to determine the visibility of each news item. Certain stories will be removed from the website while others may be given a ‘featured‘ position if the story is highly relevant and news worthy.