Of late, there has been a mushrooming growth of a lot of social media sites creating confusion among marketers as to which sites to focus on for marketing their business. There are over 100 sites right now and that’s a good size to overwhelm your wisdom. Since you are not in the business of social media but rather using social media for your business, you need to know which sites would give you more advantage over others. Also, one would always prefer to go with sites that require low maintenance in terms of time and effort. So, keeping all these factors in mind, here are five best social media sites for marketing your business. Few of them may be more suitable for you while others may be less relevant depending upon the nature of business you operate.
1. Facebook
With over a billion active users, Facebook undoubtedly is the king of social media. It’s the favorite online socializing platform of people of all ages from all around the world. This presents to you a huge opportunity to take your business before an international audience. It’s also good for local targeting since you get access to demographic and geographic stats of your audience. Options offered by Facebook for marketing your business are also better and varied compared to other platforms. You can create a group, start a fan page, promote your post, sponsor a story, invite friends to like your page, so on and so forth.
2. Twitter
Twitter is a micro-blogging site that is often described as an SMS or short messaging service of internet. Started almost around the same time as Facebook, it is also popular among all age groups across the world. Instead of ‘friends’, it’s based on the concept of ‘followers. Thus, it allows you to establish a fan following for your brand or business. Since many celebrities are on Twitter, it also works great for product/brand endorsement. Twitter also offers the option to promote your tweets. Many businesses even use it as a channel for customer service.
3. Google+
Launched in June 2011, Google+ (Google Plus) is of relatively recent origin than Facebook and Twitter but has the backing of the most popular search engine, Google; and that makes it a heavy weight champion in the social arena as well. It holds special significance for webmasters and website owners looking to improve their search engine ranking in Google. Unlike friends and followers, Google+ is based on the concept of circles. Other features include Google authorship, hangouts, hashtags, messenger, etc.
4. YouTube
Yet another social networking site owned by Google, YouTube is a popular site for uploading and sharing videos. Features like comments, like, share, embed, and detailed analytics make it a must for video marketing your brand or business. You will get good results if you combine YouTube marketing with Google search engine marketing since the performance and ranking of your video in YouTube also impacts your SERP in Google. You can also use it for building brand through ads and creative clips.
5. SoundCloud
SoundCloud offers an easy way to share your audio recording with over 76 million registered music lovers across the globe. It is of special relevance to artists and companies from the music industry (who often use it for releasing their music CDs), other businesses too can use it for audio marketing their brands. For example, you can podcast the theme song of your brand or some catchy lyrics to describe your company or services. Users can like, repost, share, add to playlist or comment on the music you share. Number of plays a podcast gets however remains the most important metric that shows your popularity to the world. If you are new on SoundCloud or otherwise having tough time getting your podcast reach the expected number of audiences, you can consider buying some plays using this SoundCloud service as a booster dose. Though the business side of SoundCloud is yet to be fully explored, podcast marketing is bound to grow along with the growth of smartphones, MP3 players and internet radios.
Apart from above, other popular social networking platforms include LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Quora, Flickr and Reddit. Even people with qualification of online PA courses have lots of information regarding social media sites, and hiring one of them can help you with the influencing on social media.
