What are the 6 types of social media and their advantages?

Whether you’re exploring new potential markets for your business or just looking for new channels to connect with your customers, there are many types of social media you can use. Some are pretty much mandatory for any business, while others are useful for a smaller subset of niche businesses.

With this in mind there are a number of options available to you if you were considering what are the 6 types of social media for your needs and your goals.

1. Social networking sites

Most of us are familiar with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These platforms help us connect with friends, family, and brands. They encourage knowledge-sharing and are all about personal, human-to-human interaction.

Advantages of these types of sites:

• Reach a target audience through ads: These platforms cultivate large, diverse communities. Advertisers can interact with people based on specific targeting metrics. For instance, an advertiser who wants to reach a predominantly young crowd could advertise on an app like Snapchat while those who want to reach a professional user may find LinkedIn more appropriate. Because these platforms are incredibly data rich, we can reach a lot of the right people without blowing the entire ad budget.
• Network: Engage with followers, find like-minded customers or potential business partners through hashtags and groups, and build connections.
•  Research: Social networking platforms are a great place for digging up customer research and using social listening tools to track conversations around specific terms. This can help us understand our audience better.

2. Social review sites

What’s is one of the first things you do when planning a trip or buying a new product?

Review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor display reviews from community members for all sorts of locations and experiences. This eliminates a lot of the guesswork that goes into booking a restaurant or hotel. You can check out the reviews and you’ll know about a place.

Businesses can really benefit from studying their reviews, the good and the bad. It helps these businesses:

• Understand the customer’s perspective: Reviews tell us about the customer experience from their own point of view. Use this to identify what’s working and discover areas with room for improvement.
• Solve problems: Reviews are an opportunity to engage with reviewers and solve any potential challenges before they become a huge deal.

3. Image sharing sites

Visual content like images, infographics, and illustrations capture our hearts and imaginations. Social media platforms like Instagram, Imgur, and Snapchat are designed to amplify the power of image sharing.

Users create, curate, and share unique images that spark conversation and speak for themselves. A picture can be worth a thousand words to your business.

These sites could be useful to:

• Encourage user-generated content: Image sharing sites are a gift for photogenic businesses. You can run campaigns encouraging users to snap and share a pic with your product and a unique hashtag.
• Create inspiration: By creating, curating, and sharing your own images, you can inspire and engage users, bonding over a shared interest.

4. Video hosting sites

YouTube has revolutionized the way we watch, create, and think about video. It transformed the medium into something accessible. Recent improvements in tech and connectivity helped video go the rest of the way.

Video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo help creators put together content and share it to a platform optimized for streaming. This accessibility makes video an important medium for businesses.

You can use video hosting sites to:

• Share phenomenal content: This point is a bit obvious, but creators can use YouTube to build communities and get their content out there.
• Engage: YouTube’s comment section offers plenty of opportunities to get to know the people watching your content.

5. Community blogs

Sometimes an image or post isn’t complex enough for the message you’ve got to share, but not everyone on the internet wants to run a blog from a self-hosted website.

Shared blogging platforms like Medium and Tumblr give people a space to express their thoughts and help connect them with readers.

These community blog sites provide an audience while allowing plenty of room for customization and self expression.

Some advantages include:

• Develop your voice: Starting a blog can be daunting. Use platforms like Medium and Tumblr to find your voice, attracts some readers, and be clear about your vision.
• Syndicate content: If you do have a blog, you can use community blogging platforms to share, re-purpose, and re-post older content and expose it to a new audience.

6. Discussion sites

Discussion sites like Reddit and Quora are specifically designed to spark a conversation. Anyone is free to ask a question or make a statement, and this attracts people with shared interests and curiosities. However, unlike Facebook and Instagram, users tend to give out less identifiable information.

How can these platforms help your business?

• Research: Reddit is made up of different sub-communities. With a bit of research, you can find and engage people in your field, discover what they’re asking, and use this as a starting point for your content marketing strategy.
• Answer questions: Quora users ask all sorts of questions. Answering them can help establish you as a thought leader and drive more traffic to your site.