Bring your Business Online by choosing the right Social platform

Social media is one of the most important tools for your business and should not be ignored. Most people are on social media everyday, so it is a good idea to use the free services to the best of your abilities and get your business out there.

Having a plan for each of your social media accounts is really important as it will help your team prepare for future activity.

Types of Social Media Platforms

The social platform used depends on various factors including: age and demographic you want to appeal to, direct/indirect selling, selling to other companies. So your business needs to identify the best channel that is going to allow you to effectively reach your target audience(s).

Facebook

One benefit of using a Facebook business page is that you can increase your exposure to customers. This is because you can reach your target audience much easier through the specific targeting tools. Having a business page on Facebook also potentially helps gather more leads without any expenses. (unless you choose to promote content.)

Facebook insights give you the opportunity to look at and assess statistics such as the number of likes, the reach of posts and more. Facebook can also help you analyse competitors in your industry to identify any trends.

Instagram

Instagram appeals to a younger demographic than other social media channels. It is a very useful platform for sharing content using photos and videos. As this channel is more visual, it is really important to plan your campaigns to include lots of great, eye catching imagery and less written content.

Twitter

Twitter is known to be very good with engagement as it attracts a unique audience and can help make certain audiences easier to pinpoint.

The advantages of Twitter are quite similar to Facebook and Linkedin, in that they all help to reach a wider audience because of the large user base.

“Twitter has 330 million monthly active users” – Hootsuite

Twitter allows you to provide a good level of customer service, by being able to respond to your audience quickly. In fact, many brands have gone as far as to set up separate customer service accounts, kept split from the main brand account.

Linkedin

Linkedin is a great social network to use in order to impress your influencers. This is because it provides you with large opportunities to connect with the top business influencers and customers. It also allows you to endorse piers (and for them to return the favour)

YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing/viewing platform. It allows individuals or companies to set up a Youtube channel and upload content to share with anyone. For businesses it is a great place to share videos explaining their processes or ideas. How-to-videos are an excellent way to get people interested in what you can offer. Remember to keep these videos less than 2 minutes.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual search engine that people can use to gather ideas and inspiration. (A bit like a digital ‘scrapbook’) It is used to upload, save, sort and manage images. There are extensions you can use on your website so that users can click the ‘pin it’ button on images on your site, allowing the user to pin them to a board. Therefore Pinterest can be a great tool in directing traffic back to your website, through the use of imagery.