The use of social media for marketing generally follow a number of goals, including driving website traffic, making contact with prospects, enhancing brand awareness, developing your organization’s personality, and enhancing productivity through online collaboration.
There are a few social networks that stand out from others as the most popular, and most useful, at least in the United States.
- Developed in 2004, Facebook is the most popular social media site currently available. It had 152 million users in the U.S. alone, as of 2012, who spend an average of 6.75 hours on the site each month. The Facebook timeline took allows brands to increase user engagement and interaction because users are able to view the company’s history and see if their friends have interacted with it.
- Twitter users tend to be young, educated, and early-adopters. It has only 21 million users, many less than Facebook, but more than half of Twitter users like to follow brands or products, making them good potential prospects. Companies that use Twitter generate about twice the leads per month over companies that don’t use it.
- Unlike many other sites, LinkedIn is meant specifically for business, rather than socialization and entertainment. The site is a great way to connect with potential customers and network with suppliers and other businesses.
- Creating a YouTube channel for you company is one of the most effective things you can do to increase lead generation and customer engagement. A video can quickly show the equipment you use, safety precautions you take, or the daily operations of your company.
- There are a lot of great sites to use for Blogging, or you could create a blog on your company website. It’s a way to generate and distribute share great fresh content, which will help increase inbound links and search engine optimization.
A number of niche social media platforms that are either still developing or targeted to a specific market are also worth noting.
- Pinterest is popular among manufacturers because of the ability to share images of their products on the pinboard-like website.
- Another site, called MyTradezone, was developed specifically for business, and allows companies to generate leads, search for deals, and request quotes from the other companies all through the site.
- Instagram is a photo-sharing site that follows the trends of increasing mobile use by allowing people to apply filters to photos and upload them from anywhere.
- The majority of Google + users are currently early adopters and professionals, but the site has a lot of potential for business use. The site is built to model people’s normal interactions in life by allowing users to divide their contacts into circles and hangout to video chat with up to ten people at once. Out of the top 100 brands, 75 of them are on Google +.
With the many social networks out there, there is one that will fit your needs. Such as Niche Social Networks. If you can find a niche one specific to your industry, leverage that. If not, just do an awesome job on the most popular ones and have fun doing it!
