So you’ve set up your own small business, or you’re only just getting to the point of marketing your services to the world. While local networking and traditional advertising can get you some good results, they’re time consuming and potentially expensive ventures. Social Media is a key factor in not only promoting your business but also building your company brand, allowing your business to establish its own voice.
There are hundreds of Social Media Sites that spring up and promptly die off, but there are several big social media websites with a stable user base and unique qualities that suit businesses especially well. Here’s a rundown of the biggest social media sites and what would be the best choice for your business.
On the surface, Facebook is one of the least suited websites for businesses, as it has something of an image problem. With 1.1 billion active users around the world, there’s bound to be some cranks and weirdos using the site to post embarrassing messages for the world to see. Nevertheless, that’s a huge user base that can see your content, whether it’s ads or general interest/brand awareness posts.
If a user likes your post, it should then appear to the user’s friends. Seeing as the average Facebook user has around 130 ‘friends’, this can rapidly snowball into millions of eyes on your business. Like all social media sites, Facebook provides an easy way to publicly interact with fans and customers, and also provides advertising services on the Facebook platform, which will then discreetly promote your business in searches and Facebook groups.
Twitter has a smaller user base than Facebook at around 328 million users, but has some advantages that can be more useful to certain businesses than others. Twitter implements a 140 character (soon to be 280) character limit that necessarily limits what you can say in one post, but as the phrase goes, ‘Less is More’. When you make a post on Twitter you need to keep it concise and to the point. This makes it easier for people to skim through while browsing their tweets, which will result in higher engagement.
Hashtags are a great way to latch onto trending subjects among Twitter’s user base, but it’s important to avoid overdoing it. It’s also probably the best way to interact with your fans or customers, partly due to the character limit and its highly active user base.
Google+
The red-headed stepchild of the big social media sites, Google+ has an image problem completely different from Facebook: Google+ seems to be a ghost town in comparison. While Google frequently boasts about its registered user base of over 1 billion, active users total around 540 million. The main advantages of G+ are its connection to Google’s other services, allowing a savvy business owner to promote their services over the Google search engine, AdWords, YouTube and Google
Maps. Otherwise, it functions like Facebook with the advantages of being connected to the biggest search engine in town.
LinkedIn has cultivated a very different atmosphere from other social media sites: While Facebook and Google+ tries to attract a general interest crowd, LinkedIn is strictly business for many of its users, with 433 million of them active users. This has its advantages: users are far more likely to engage with you on LinkedIn than elsewhere, and you can develop a network of customers and B2B clients rapidly.
LinkedIn provides you with similar tools to Facebook and Google+, but provides you an audience that is actively looking for businesses like you. It’s also a great place to fish for fresh new talent.
In conclusion, what site you choose to focus on should be dictated by what kind of client or customer you wish to work for. If you deal with the general public, Facebook and Twitter are the best at generating interest. If you want to develop B2B relationships, LinkedIn and Google+ are far more conducive to success than FB and Twitter. Either way, keep your social media campaign on point and you’ll quickly find that there was huge demand for your services after all.
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