If your website is devoted to a particular niche, you may want to look beyond the standard Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+ social sites to promote it. Be aware, however, that you'll face a learning curve. It's well worth scaling, though and just incidentally, it illustrates the difference between Google's and Facebook's approaches to information.
Facebook, as you might be aware, makes it very difficult for you to move any of your information to another website. It even blocked a third-party application that made it easier for users to move information about their contacts into a spreadsheet. The social site started blocking the application right around the time Google+ went into limited public trials, even though the app came out several months before that. Many users found that the application made it easier to port their contacts from Facebook to Google Plus, which is probably why Facebook blocked it. It would certainly explain the timing.
Google, on the other hand, created an application that allows users to move all of their information out of Google's services in just a few clicks. You can visit the website for the Data Liberation Front for more information on this. From the site: The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. The DLF created the Google Takeout product, which lets you quickly and easily remove your Google data from Buzz; Picasa; your Google Profile; and your Contacts, Circles, and Streams, among other Google products.
Why am I mentioning all this? If you're going to promote your website on social networks, or even add a social aspect to your website, in one way or another you're going to be dealing with information. You're also going to be dealing with the ways in which users deal with information. You may even be dealing with information ABOUT information, which is its own discipline (ask any librarian). You're going to learn that users on different social networks deal with ostensibly the same information in different ways, and you need that knowledge if you're going to successfully promote your website.
To elaborate on that point, I'm going to take a look at two special interest social networks that let you handle similar information, but in very different ways. The information we'll be dealing with is books. The two special interest networks, LibraryThing and Ravelry, both let you add information to your profile about the books you own. But what kind of information you get, and what you can do with it, differs quite a bit between the two networks. Primarily, this is because the purpose of each network and its users is very different. It's important that you grasp this point whenever you approach a new special-interest network.
Before I dive in, I want to add that both LibraryThing and Ravelry offer their users many fun diversions aside from listing their books. I'm not talking about Facebook-style games, and I don't think either of them has advanced to the point of having Hangouts (or even text-based chats). But it's easy to create and join groups based on particular topics, with their own rules; both offer search functions; you can connect with friends, comment in forums, and more. Right now, however, I'm going to focus on how each one handles books.
Website Promotion 
