Social media is a vital element of modern day marketing and brand awareness. Its speed and flexibility offers a unique way for businesses to communicate with their target audiences, and allows us to gain real insight into our customer base. If you choose to engage in social media marketing, you will quickly find that there is a range of platforms to choose from. We thought we’d share our top tips for choosing where to focus your social media marketing efforts.
The social network for professionals, LinkedIn is fairly unique in its place amongst the social media giants. A brilliant platform for B2B companies, this channel allows you to educate your client base as well as demonstrate knowledge and expertise in your industry. You will find this space rife with recruiters, but we still recommend this channel for businesses looking to develop brand awareness in their industry.
A comparatively informal channel, Twitter’s unique twist used to be an obnoxiously short character limit. This did two things: forced people to be clever about how they structure their posts, and kept engagement up where attention spans were shrinking. Recently, however, the character count was doubled from 140 to 280. This allows a little more leeway to get your company message seen by a large audience, especially if you use seasonal and daily hashtags. It can also be a useful social media to use for customer service, as it tends to encourage interactivity and engagement.
As well as all this, Twitter also offers a near unique opportunity to directly contact celebrities and influencers to interact with and endorse your brand.
With an array of formatting features and choices, Instagram is a creative social media used by individuals and businesses. Companies can use posts and stories to advertise their products and services, as well as expressing their brand through organic content. Until now, Instagram has prevented the sharing of links in posts, reducing the channels’ ability to drive traffic to your site. More recently though, new promotional abilities such as “swipe up” have changed the game, opening up more and more possibilities.
Being the largest social media channel in terms of active users, it is unsurprising that we recommend you give your company a presence on this platform. Not only does Facebook provide you with a huge audience potential, but it also allows you to register your company details and give your customers a quick and easy way to contact you. Even if you aren’t serious about implementing an active social media marketing strategy, your business should still have a Facebook presence.
With around 200 million monthly users, Pinterest is a great place to be if you’re looking to grow brand awareness. More than two-thirds of Pinterest users say they have discovered a new brand on this platform, which is unsurprising considering people who take to Pinterest are often looking for inspiration.
Google Plus
While this platform is often underappreciated and underutilised, it is worth noting that everything posted on Google Plus is immediately indexed by Google, and therefore positively affecting your search engine rankings. It is therefore recommended to use keywords as hashtags in your posts to contribute to your social media marketing strategy.
There are countless social media channels to explore and grow your online presence with, however, sometimes it can be hard to know where to focus your social media marketing efforts. For more information about using social media for business, or if you have any questions, get in touch today.