A critical part of any Seo Strategy should be Social Network Analysis (SNA). When you pick your niche one of your first tasks should be to kick off some SNA of to the top social networks in your niche so that you can strategically spend your time getting to know the right people.

What you are looking to do is figure out who are the real influencers in your sector, lets take SEO an an example. If we have a quick look at sphinn we can quickly gleam some useful information on where we should spend our time if we wanted to get integrated quickly into a community.

Below is a table that i pulled together earlier in a few minutes but gives some information that we can start with.

Its just a simple list pulled from the last 99 sphinn topics to go hot, we can get a good overview of where to start looking to find out who are the influencers in the community.

If we wanted to get into some proper analysis we would dig into each of the submits and figure out who are the ones that are sphinning each others and we could quickly from this, work out a simple mesh to show the primary groupings within the community. Once we know this we can start properly introducing ourselves to the right people. All of this can be easily automated so is not a big chore.

However if you want to really understand a social network then look at who are the people that are already benefiting and see if you can figure out how they are doing it. I included a simple table at the bottom that shows who's domains are benefiting most.

This is only meant to be a starter for newbies, you can get as complex as you want but remember to make sure its worth all the effort, its incredibly interesting to do proper social network analysis and can prove distracting so be warned you can end up spending a huge amount of time monitoring every ones every move trying to figure out things that will never make you a profit!!