There are simply too many social media sites for one company (let alone one person) to realistically participate in (here’s a list of the top 60 – yes, 60!). Knowing which sites your customers are active on is the best metric to use when determining where your brand should have a presence, but you need to create the right kind of content for those sites.
Understanding the best ways to use different social media platforms can help you create content that is appropriate for each site, making content creation and engagement easier and more effective. Make the most of your inbound marketing campaign!
Here’s our list of the best social media sites and the best ways to use them.
Facebook is the giant of social media right now, and if your business isn’t active here, then you might as well not even be on the internet. Over 1 billion people use this site, so the potential exposure for your brand is immense, but being present there and using it correctly are two different things.
Facebook is the Swiss Army knife of the social media world. It works well for many things (SEO, engagement, different content types), but the best thing this site offers is numbers.
No matter the content type, Facebook is the places to get it seen, but it is lacking in some areas. It isn’t the best forum for engaging with your customers (Twitter) or hosting videos (YouTube), and it isn’t great for B2B (LinkedIn), but if you want your content to be seen by a billion people, make sure you post it on Facebook.
Twitter’s speciality is engagement. This is the ideal place (at least for now) to have conversations with your followers, and it is a favorite forum for customer complaints. Twitter is the one social media site you need to be monitoring constantly.
Because engagement is so easy on Twitter, followers expect instant responses from companies, and brands ignore tweets at their peril. 72% of people expect complaints to be addressed within the hour, not a huge window for reading the complaint, crafting a solution, and responding.
This is a great place to demonstrate customer service skills, and the proper response to a complaint can do wonders for the profile of your company.
Twitter is also a great place for snark, and the PR benefits to a well crafted response can make your brand legendary in the Twitterverse (Taco Bell seems to be on its game, on Twitter at least). Just make sure you know your audience before you try something like this, and try to keep it clean.
Google+
Google+ (G+) is like a Chinese ghost town: it’s beautiful, huge, and empty. That being said, your company better be there – Google+ is critical for SEO ranking and snippets.
Google ranks Google+ higher and crawls content posted there faster than anywhere else, and they use G+ to gather rich snippets, which increases your visibility in search results immeasurably.
Because not many people are active on Google+, it can be harder to build a following, but time invested here can have a serious impact on SEO.
Be active on Google+, share your new content here immediately, and make sure you’re encouraging your customers to follow you on Google+ as well. The more people in your circle, the more likely you are to show up in search results.
A good Google+ listing and following are critical elements in any good SEO plan.
YouTube
YouTube is a great social media platform on its own, but its real value lies in content curation. If you want to share your videos anywhere on the internet, the easiest way to do it is to post the video to your YouTube channel and then share the link.
Embedding video content on your site is almost as easy. YouTube provides the code you need, and all you have to do is add the code the the appropriate place in your website’s code.
Of course, video is the future of the internet, with 82% of consumer traffic expected to be video by 2020, and with over 1 billion people using YouTube and 3.25 billion hours of video watched each month, you cannot afford to skip this platform.
No other video hosting site offers the ease-of-use combined with number of users that YouTube does, making this site a must for any business.
“LinkedIn? Thanks, but I’m not looking for a job right now.” This seems to be a common reaction from many people. Of course LinkedIn is a great place to find a job and connect with hiring managers, but it’s a great place to build professional credibility as well.
By posting on LinkedIn, you’re able to build your reputation as a thought leader or an authority on a subject in an environment where more technical or detailed pieces are not only normal, but expected.
Don’t be afraid of technical terms here. This is the place for industry jargon and acronyms, as your posts will most likely be read by others in the field who both know and care about details that would leave most people shaking their heads.
LinkedIn is the ideal place for your company’s B2B interactions.
Conclusion
Knowing the right content to post on the right social media site is crucial to developing and engaging with followers (aka inbound marketing!). By understanding what each site is designed for, who is using each site, and why they are using it, you can maximize the benefits of your presence on those sites.