Beginning, small, medium, large, gigantic these days the size of an enterprise doesn't matter when it comes to the question whether or not they use social media for marketing purposes. Practically every single business owner out there can recognize the advantages that using social media marketing can bring to their company, and so over the last few years social networks have considerably developed to cater to those using them for money-making purposes. Seeing as how, at its core, social media is all about communication, connection and interaction between online users, it has become one of the best means of reaching potential customers wherever they may be, and so it is important that you choose the proper social media tool for your company to use and stay ahead of the game. Here's a brief guide in order to help you do that.
Before choosing your own social media tool, let us take a look at the ones that are most commonly in use today. Each one of the networks listed below has been designed with specific functions and features in mind, with some of them being made for international communication while others focus on one specific niche. In any case, here is a run-down of those tools and how they can help you to develop your online business
YouTube
While it is true that YouTube is primarily a video hosting website, the sheer amount of daily users it has turned it into a social media site. It can be used to share videos with billions of people around the world, with many companies using it to launch their viral advertisement campaigns and pretty much any other kind of promotional content made in video format. If you are planning on using mainly audiovisual materials in order to promote your company and spread the word about it, then YouTube is definitely one social media tool you'll want to use, as there is literally no better place out there to share videos and make sure that they are seen by everyone else.
At the moment, Facebook may very well be the single largest social network out there, having crossed the one billion users milestone a few months back. Even though at the beginning it was designed for socialization, companies still have a lot of success attracting buyers through it, especially now that the developers are making Facebook more business-oriented. A network such as this one is best-suited to those who perform most, if not all of their business online, allowing you to reach out to countless users in numerous ways, including Facebook adds, fan pages, and even good old post shares. It should also be added that Facebook has made it easy for people to advertise to a specific demographic base, being able to categorize users by a whole set of criteria easily found on their profiles. In other words, it allows you to advertise to the type of people you want to.
Google +
Google's very own social network, it has a number of features that you would expect to find on virtually any social media site, such as group video chatting for instance, not to mention that promoting your website through it will also yield certain SEO benefits. Regardless of which tool you have decided to use, it is highly recommended that you also use Google +, at least for its basic features, as any site linked to it gains somewhat of a bonus with Google.
Perhaps the most business-oriented social media out there, LinkedIn was designed to beused for professional purposes, allowing you to post your C.V. and organizations to create quite extensive profiles. One should primarily look at it as a place where they can find business contacts, recruit others, and maintain a contact with your partners and colleagues. If you are trying to outsource the more mundane aspects of your work to someone, then you should regularly check with the options LinkedIn has available for you.
Officially referred to as a micro-blogging site, Twitter is the perfect tool for short and concise advertisements that need to be delivered quickly, allowing its users to create messages no longer than a hundred and forty characters. Contrary to what many marketers out there may think, the lack of characters can actually be beneficial, as people won't feel bogged down by walls of text and will be simply given a link to follow. It is recommended that you use Twitter in order to link to pages with a good amount of content. In addition, like many business owners have already done, you can also use Twitter in order to set up a support system for your product, brand or company, asking your customers to tweet you with any problems they are having so that you can look into them quickly and easily.
It has to be mentioned that even though all of the social media sites that were discussed above are entirely free to use, it still takes time and energy to run a campaign on them. In addition, as was mentioned before, each one of them has been designed in order to achieve a certain specific task. Instead of fully investing yourself in one of the networks, you are heavily encouraged to take some time to learn about all of them and perhaps even use multiple ones in order to achieve different goals. Even if you lack the time to run a social media marketing campaign, there are always people you can hire in order to run the show for you.
Author Bio: Jason Smith is an online manager for Inbound Marketing Company. Jason likes blogging about online strategies that are related to SEO, Content, PPC & Lead generation.