Top 3 Platforms For Your Business’ Social Media Marketing
Knowing which of the many platforms to use for your social media marketing needs can be confusing. How do you know which are the best to use for your company?
There are many things to consider, but if done correctly, social media marketing can be a huge advantage to your business’ image, community building, and sales. Following are the top three platforms to use to help ensure your success in this important endeavor.
Facebook started in February 2004 and was primarily used by college students looking for a quick way to share information on a network. Facebook now has an estimated 800 million active users of all ages, interests, education levels, and occupations in every corner of the world. It is easily the most used social networking site in the world based on the number of active monthly users.
Why You Need Facebook
Creating a page specifically for your business enables you to connect with your customers, to address their concerns, to promote events, and to drive followers to your business’ website.
You can also advertise on Facebook through paid ad services. You can do this to get more followers, to drive traffic to your website, to get more people to come to your events, to encourage potential customers or clients to contact you, or to get them to download your app.
When you post to Facebook, your content will show up in your followers’ newsfeed (their “wall”). They can then “like” or share your posts, and when they do, they will show up in their friends’ news feeds.
If you post really useful and interesting information, it can easily “go viral,” thereby enabling your message, as well as your company’s image, to appear before a multitude of potential new clients or customers.
Yeah, Twitter, you know, the one that limits your posts to 140 characters, fewer if you include an image. And you should always include an image with every post on any social media site.
Twitter got its start in 2004 and today has an estimated active user base of 300 million word-wide. It’s well suited for communicating short, quickly updating news or announcements to customers or clients.
Why You Need Twitter
Twitter is an avalanche of constantly fresh information. You can get your business’ announcements out into the world and, if people are interested, your “tweets” can get re-tweeted (shared) and seen by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of viewers, thereby going viral, just as with Facebook posts.
With Twitter, it’s easy to target information to specific, interested users via the use of the hash tag (#). You simply place the “#” in front of a keyword that will show Twitter users what the main subject of the post is. Doing this will also organize tweets into directories by hash tag keyword, making it much easier for visitors to find your tweets. Twitter is credited with inventing using the hash tag for this purpose.
Twitter differs from Facebook in that users “follow” each other. You are not automatically following someone just because they follow you. You should always follow your followers back, as this is considered a common courtesy in the world of Twitter.
LinkedIn got its start in 2003 and has since been considered THE social networking site for business and work-related activities. The platform has over 135 million users in over 200 countries. You can create a personal account for free, and then add a “company page,” which can be thought of as a curriculum vitae for your business.
Why you need LinkedIn
If you own or manage a business, you should ensure that you have a well maintained company page on LinkedIn, as many people considering doing business with an organization will check for a LinkedIn page to get more information.
You can also place job listings for your company on LinkedIn. It’s well worth joining groups and, even better, to start and maintain your own groups. Doing so gets your business’ name out among those in your industry as well as potential clients/customers.
For more information on the social media marketing services offered by WebTek, contact us today!