A large number of marketers are now using various types of social media to engage with their audiences. But if you’re tasked with a social media strategy for your company, you might be wondering about what social media platforms you should be on. The list of social media networks is growing, and so is social media.
Well-known social sites like Facebook are always evolving and adding new features. With a greater need for a social presence and an overwhelming amount of choices, it can be hard to pick the right social media. You might not want to manage a channel on every imaginable social network, but you also don’t want to miss great brand-awareness opportunities.
What are the major social networking sites?
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the types of social media which are often called “networking” sites because they allow user accounts to interact with each other in a variety of ways.
If you’re a small business, like a restaurant, a social network such as Facebook could be a great place to start your social strategy. With Facebook, you can build a business profile that includes links to your website and details about your business.
Once you’re profile is set up, you can post regular updates about your business, “like” other pages, and answer customer queries, post comments or messages. Business profiles also allow other Facebook users to give you reviews.
For companies looking to offer a professional service, B2B or publishing companies, LinkedIn is another great way to grow your following. LinkedIn emphasizes career-related networking.
Brands looking to build an audience of professionals from a certain industry can create a business profile there, categorize it with an industry type, and then use posts and messaging to publish updates. They can also use messaging and comment features to interact with their audiences, or users who comment on their posts.
A Twitter account could be helpful to companies in a wide spectrum of industries, from entertainment to e-commerce. Twitter allows you to create a profile where you can list and link company information.
You can then use Twitter to post about company updates, tag companies or customers in posts, retweet positive customer tweets, and respond to customer questions via tweet or direct messages.
On all the three networks, users can easily communicate with others through simple actions like tagging, hashtagging, commenting, private messaging, reacting to posts, and re-sharing content.
Aside from social interaction, newsfeeds on common social networking sites are designed to show off a mix of text and visuals, rather than one primary content type.
This flexibility makes it easy to start a social strategy because you can experiment with different forms of content before branching out to social sites that require more specific content types.
For those who want to dabble in video or graphics, these social sites could be a great place to test these contents. With the growth of video marketing, social media sites have launched advanced features like Facebook Stories and Twitter’s live streams.
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have also started to encourage native video and photo uploads. Facebook even adjusted its algorithms to favour live video and image uploads. This has caused these types of native contents to achieve greater user engagement.
What are the major photo sharing sites?
Two of the biggest social networks that specialize in photo sharing are Instagram and Pinterest.
Instagram offers a visual feed with posts showing photos and short videos followed by a caption. Users can also post live video or create Instagram Stories that disappear after a day. Like the social networking sites above, users can interact with others through tags, likes, comments, or direct message.
It would be helpful to companies like restaurants or stores that want to photograph, display and update followers about their food, goods, or products in a crisp, clean way.
Instagram has become a home to influencer marketing. It also offers opportunities for advertising and ecommerce because of its highly-visual layout.
Unlike some social networking sites, Instagram emphasize visuals and doesn’t allow link sharing directly in posts. Basic users on Instagram can only share links in their bio. Verified users, or accounts with over 10,000 followers, can post links in their Stories.
Although basic users have minimal linking options, Instagram has tried to make the it even friendlier for ecommerce businesses with the addition of Shoppable posts.
Pinterest is suited for ecommerce companies, such as those who sell household products, and businesses that would like a place to share crisp standalone product images with links.
It similarly offers a photo-based feed with posts that can include a photo and short description. Unlike Instagram, it allows all users to link directly to websites or product landing pages in posts.
One interesting aspect of Pinterest is that users can heart posts from others, or assign them to a themed “board.” For example, users might make boards centred around topics like “Inspirational Quotes.”
Once a board is created, other users can follow it. A business could potentially make a board with their own product posts, or find their products on another user’s board.
Before getting started on one or both of these networks, you’ll want to determine whether your goal is to gain brand awareness or link-based traffic.
While Instagram and Pinterest can both be helpful tools for product images and brand awareness, Instagram’s active audience is much larger than Pinterest’s.
When choosing a social media, you may want to consider your content-related range. Both of them require visual imagery, but you might also need to include video creation into your Instagram strategy.