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Friend asked a great question but in the wrong way. Social Media isn't important to me in and of itself, but each social media channel can help communicate marketing messages and thus become valuable and important.

Key is "matching the hatch" to borrow a fly fishing term.

Matching the hatch puts the right kind of content, what Gary Vaynerchuk calls "native content', on each social net when THAT information is important to communicating a marketing message. Here is how I answered:

Depends on what I'm trying to accomplish.

If I want comments and discussion GPlus.
If I want feedback from friends Facebook.
If I want to generally test Scoop.it.
If I want a "set it and forget it" content solution Paper.li.
If I have something happening now or want to newsjack Twitter.
To raise money on creative or gaming projects Kickstarter.
If I want to share videos YouTube.

If I want to serialize stories Storify.
If I want to test an infographic Pinterest. 
If I want to do something with audio then SmartCloud.
If I want to create sustainable and potentially "evergreen" content then I use WP blogs. Content becomes "evergreen" based on how it performs (views, shares, conversions).
If I want to sell something ecom then Shopify. 

Match the hatch to get the most from your content, your growing social media tribe, your time and content marketing and curation efforts.  

I selected this piece by Patricia Redsicker for Social Media Examiner for two reasons -

**It's a great review of Lee Oden's new book Optimize: How to Engage Your Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing 

**The book is timely and relevant it's about optimizing content for customer and user experiences, rather than for search engines which is becoming increasingly important

Here's what caught my attention:

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage for an Optimized State of Mind

**Use words that matter most to your customers in titles, links and body copy in order to inspire your readers to take action

Chapter 9: Content Isn't King, It's the Kingdom - Creation vs. Curation

**mix curated content with original content. In fact,  curating is a great way to extend your own site, but only in addition to—not instead of—your original content

So many great tips on types of content to curate, here are just a few:

**Content created by influential people who are important to your target audience

**Aggregating the best comments from your own or others's blogs

**White papers, ebooks and case studies

**Tips, how-to's and best practices

Chapter 11 Social Networking Development - Don't Be Late to the Networking Party

**Listen, participate, create optiized content and understand the triggers that will inspire sales or referrals

**It's important to know which specific social networks are relevant to your customers

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://tinyurl.com/cycs5g4]

This piece and infographic is from Adam Vincenzini on his blog.

I selected this article because it's another way for you to find key influencers and these tools will help to narrow your search

Here are some highlights:

Instead of focusing on the subjectivity of this process (and how this insight is deployed) Here's how you can use a combination of free tools to narrow your search.

Where do online influencers operate?

**They are active everywhere:

     Most popular are:

     blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Online

     communities, discussion boards

Assumptions:

**Influencers are active on Twitter

**Influencers operate some for of blogging hub

Focus on the intelligence you can glean from Twitter initially then verify this initial sweep with blog (or relevant hub) data

The initial steps involve:

1. Search by keyword

2. Search by location

3 tools useful in the process: The first two you can also search by location:

**followerwonk.com - then run this through another influencer tool -   

     tweetlevel to give it even more relevance (this isn't fool proof)

**locafollow.com

**twingulate.com

There are more suggestions in this piece having said that:

**No matter how hard we try, a 100% fool proof influence rating is near on impossible because influence is not a science, it can't be.

** this can help narrow things down, significantly

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://tinyurl.com/7humubp]