It seems like social media is EVERYWHERE now. Everyone is using it now, consumers and businesses of all sizes alike. But as a business have you ever stopped to think which social media network is actually working for your business?
The process of using social media can be very time consuming, so you want to make sure you are using the best social network to achieve your goals and objectives. But do you know which social network will help you achieve your goals?
Today I want to offer you some quick insights into the top five social networks, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube. We will be looking at four main factors, customer communication, brand exposure, traffic to your site and SEO value.
Everyone is on Facebook, right? Here’s how Facebook can help out your business.
Customer Communication
Facebook offers you an easy and efficient way to talk to your entire demographic. You can create and push content and help manage your business reputation to your current fans. The only downside is if you want to reach non-fans, or 100% of your fan base, you will have to run sponsored posts, which means having to pay for advertising and knowing how to effectively build a successful ad campaign.
Brand Exposure
Because of their huge user base, Facebook is one of the quickest and most cost effective ways to get brand exposure.
Traffic To Your Site
Thanks to that huge user base we talked about earlier, one new fan can lead to 20 new website visitors. These visitors are leads, or potential customers for your business!
SEO Value
As of right now, only shared links from fan pages matter for search engine optimization, but as things progress it is likely that in the future social media network sites like Facebook will play a bigger role in search engine ranking.
Google+
As the #2 social media network, Google+ has become a quiet contender among social media networks.
Customer Communication
As a the second place social media network, Google+ still lacks the reach of Facebook and Twitter. But even though it doesn’t have the same reach, it does facilitate communication with customers.
Brand Exposure
As Google’s social network, Google+ offers excellent brand exposure. Your account will appear in branded search results, which will add credibility and increased exposure.
Traffic To Your Site
Google+ helps to provide your site with new traffic, plus users tend to stay on the site whose links they follow.
SEO Value
Because the Google +1 button allows for users to search both public and private information, this gives Google+ a advantage at providing value for search engine optimization and search engine ranking.
Twitter offers businesses a great way to keep your customers informed about your business’ latest news. It’s large user base and real-time element makes it one of the best social media networks a business can use.
Customer Communication
Twitter is one of the best channels for direct communication with your customers. It allows you to have real-time conversations with your customers.
Brand Exposure
Twitter offers an easy, widely used and cost-effective way to gain brand exposure.
Traffic To Your Site
Inserting links and call to actions into your tweets gives Twitter an
unmatched ability to drive traffic directly to your site.
SEO Value
The search engine optimization value on Twitter beneficial for businesses due to the fact that Google gives authority ranks for Twitter profiles.
As one newest social media networks, Pinterest has already established a huge following among women, showing that a picture truly is worth a thousand words.
Customer Communication
Aside from the ability to showcase your new product, Pinerest does not offer the opportunity for business to directly communicate with customers.
Brand Exposure
As visual content continues to grow and dominate social media, this makes Pinterest one of the most powerful tools for brand exposure. Visual content, such as images and video are viewed 70% more then written content. So if your business is visual, Pinterest is the place to be.
Traffic To Your Site
Most pinned images contain links back to a site, which tremendously helps drive traffic to your site. It is currently one of the top three traffic referral sites.
SEO Value
Although Pinterest’s Pins do not allow for links to be tracked by search engines, it can seriously increase your websites traffic and increase your brand awareness. In addition, as mentioned before things constantly get updated and revised so I would not be surprised if Pinterest becomes a huge asset to business search engine optimization in the future.
One of the best social media networks for B2B brands. LinkedIn offers you a platform to connect and engage with industry professionals.
Customer Communication
LinkedIn offers an opportunity to connect with your customers through groups with specific interests connected to your brand.
Brand Exposure
Because LinkedIn is a professional networking site, it provides impressive exposure to the business world. This allows you to promote your personal and business brand to a variety of professional contacts and organizations.
Traffic To Your Site
One of the biggest drawbacks of using LinkedIn is that it is not a huge referral site. Though you can get a lot of connections, not a lot of them will end up at your site, because of this it is extremely important to properly manage and dedicated resources to increase traffic to your site.
SEO Value
LinkedIn’s profiles are some of the easiest and most frequently SEO-ranked social profiles on the web. So having your business on LinkedIn can help you end up on search engine result pages and strongly benefit your business’ search engine optimization.
YouTube
YouTube is now ranked as the #3 social media network. As visual content continues to grow, YouTube has become the place consumers go to get their video fix.
Customer Communication
Video has become a great way to get your customers involved. It provides unique ways to engage, entertain, and inform your customer. YouTube offers the prefect platform to do all these things.
Brand Exposure
YouTube offers a great way to promote your brand. As a visual medium it offers a great way to continuously keep your customer engaged with your brand and to share your content.
Traffic To Your Site
YouTube offers a great opportunity to drive traffic to your site. Entertain your customer or potential customer with a great video and
they will more than likely want to discover more about who you are as a brand.
SEO Value
Consistently using YouTube can seriously help bump up your search engine optimization. Just remember to integrate keywords, sitemaps, titles and robot text files to help judge relevance.
As you can see, your options for social media networks are diverse, and we only covered the most popular social media networks! When deciding which networks to use always keep in mind what your objectives are and what you hope to accomplish.
Lastly, don’t forget that in order to run successful social media campaigns you must be willing dedicate sufficient time and resources to ensure they are properly managed and maintained.