It goes without saying, if you have a business you absolutely need to have a social presence. What this means is you need to be on social media. I’m sure you’ve heard this already, but the tricky thing to this advice is there are so many out there that it’d be impossible to manage being on all of them.
This post is designed to help alleviate this stress as we explore various social media platforms that are worth looking into. Some of them are wildly popular social media must haves while others aren’t as big but worth checking out as they can help your business a lot in their own ways.
The biggest of them all. Despite Facebook being wrapped in scandals, it’s still a massive platform with over two billion users across the world. It’s a must-have if you are running a business as it is full of great features to help grow your business and many of your customers hang out there.
Another big social media giant to consider it’s a marketers heaven as the overall design is meant for short videos and short lines of text. You’re literally making an advertisement filled with useful information. The key is to sort through all the noise and make your stuff stand out.
This visual oriented social media site is great for businesses that like to show off a lot. Pictures and videos are powerful marketing tools and having a site devoted solely to that means it’s a gold mine for potential.
While this social media site has a more professional tone to it than any other site, it’s still a great platform to keep an eye on. You’ll be dealing more so with other businesses and that can be a great thing. Either you can expand your professional network or even find clients if you business is more B2B oriented. Think of it as a sort of Facebook for the business world.
Pinterest is a great place to store a lot of your content. One of the big features of Pinterest is your ability to create boards. From there you can store all kinds of posts and section them off into various categories. This makes things easier for customers and again since it’s all visual it’s a great marketing tool.
YouTube
Videos are where it’s at and YouTube is wildly popular site that facilitates it. Videos are gaining a lot of traction and this site makes the process of uploading videos and sharing them to other platforms incredibly easy. Also YouTube is owned by Google, so anytime you upload new videos, they appear in search results.
Mix
Previously known as StumbleUpon, Mix is basically a re-skin of StumbleUpon. It’s a discovery platform allowing you to sort through a random assortment of blog posts, and videos that are placed directly by other users.
It’s a source for back linking – an SEO tactic in boosting your page rank – and a great place for you to find and share content quickly that you can share with your audience.
It’s a fresh take to old school forum boards. While the overall style still looks rather retro, it’s still a solid site for quality traffic. Reddit is basically a news aggregator with social features like discussion boards and a rating system.
The big thing here is that Reddit has sub sections which are quite niche. Through these sub-reddits, you’ll be able to grow your audience exactly how you’d like. Contribute though with your thoughts, don’t make it a blatant sales pitch. You’ll get called out on that and the negative backlash can hurt.
Quora
While it’s not as big as the other social media giants, Quora is popular and has a dedicated fan base. The platform is all about asking questions and answering them. You can devote yourself to answering questions and in turn that can build your authority and traffic substantially. Quora even has a section devoted to a blog, allowing you to recycle your content with ease.
Yelp
Yelp is a great review site and a good way to grow your audience as well. If you provide great products or services people can leave behind good reviews for you. It’s a solid strategy for those who really like digging into other customers experiences before purchasing.
Meetup
While it’s not exactly a place for your business to set up shop, this can be good grounds for making new connections. Whether it’s an entrepreneurial friend or a potential customer, Meetup is pretty solid in building relationships. You’re also free to starting your own special events or starting a group as well.
SoundCloud
The final social media platform in this list is SoundCloud, a audio distribution platform. While not everyone reading this is a musician, SoundCloud provides a great source of interviews, audio books (in some cases), and podcasts. It’s a great outlet for those who make those kinds of things and want to consider other options for distribution.
Conclusion
There are so many social media channels out there to keep up with, but picking a handful of these that fit your needs is a good marketing strategy to do. But do keep one thing in mind, just because you’re on the platform doesn’t mean you need to devote several hours a day to it. Making content on there is important, but so is running your business. Aim to have a balance between being on social media and doing your work. That or consider hiring a social media manager to help you along the way. I would caution you to not try to do it all, it’s better to focus on a few and with effective engagement it will go a long way.