*This content was previously published on Social Conversations in September 2009.  Social conversations was a product of Serengeti Communications which closed in 2012.

Hope that headline grabbed your attention! Especially if you are planning your entire social media strategy around the marketing tactics of Digg, StumbleUpon or MySpace, you just might want to read on.

When it comes to having Business Value, according to a survey performed by MarketingProfs, utilizing Digg, StumbleUpon and MySpace as social media tactics are pretty much worthless to those marketers who where surveyed. Even marketing tactics around YouTube were found to have little value by the survey. Where did they find extreme value? Twitter and Blogging.

(posted w/ permission from Marketing Profs)

According to the MarketingProfs survey of over 200 Twitter users, Twitter ranks behind only blogs as the social media tool that delivers the most value. On a five-point scale where those Twitter users they surveyed ranked value of the marketing tactics they were using in social media strategies, 41 percent of respondents said Twitter delivers “great value” to their company.

I’m not going to give away the whole report or survey since the report is available for only $49 from Marketing Profs. Honestly, this is a great bargain since it not only gives you the survey information but 10 different Twitter Success Stories.

What I have presented here though should get your mind wondering about your strategies in social media, or those strategies being recommended to you to implement.  What are you going to find the most valuable?  Is your whole strategy that has been presented to you based around these marketing tactics a lot of other marketers are starting to find no value in?

Of course there also needs to be research done into where your audience is.  If you are a company that provides a certain kind of content, you strategy might find extreme business value in implementing a strategy around Stumbleupon.  If you are a rock band who needs to get the word out, MySpace may just be the place for you.  If you are a “green company” and putting out a lot of content around that, Digg could just be a natural place to seed your content.

However most companies implementing strategies around these types of tactics just might not find a great business value in doing so.  It’s all about establishing what will be your “Return”, your “Value” on the investment you put into your social media strategy.