Five Major Social Media Platforms That Lets You Beneficial Your Businesses

Posted on Jun 11 2012 - 8:53am by Editorial Staff

This is the second part of two step social media series, for first part click here.

So, now you have decided that you want to opt for social media platforms, but now what the next major outbreak that you have to consider, there are numerous numbers of social media platforms, which one you choose for your business – will it be Facebook? Or Twitter? Or any other – confused, well you need not to be, as answer is simple, the question for you here is which among the list suits your requirement the most.

Twitter or Facebook? LinkedIn, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, or even MySpace?

We know that Twitter known well for its micro-blogging platform, with Facebook you can put up bigger stuff, LinkedIn serves as a professional branding network for your business and with Tumblr, you can come up with blog, a platform for regular content. But, since there are many options, you will definitely get confused. Here is a breakdown of the five major social media sites and how they can be beneficial to businesses.

Facebook

Known as the social giant as it is having a userbase of more than 901 million, but still why it is so important. It allow you to connect with your audience, let you start a conversation and to update with company news.

The advantage you get with this social media platform is that your conversation will be gathered all in one single place. Your potential new customers as well as the old one feel the way better as you show them how much you care about them and Facebook allows them to do just that.

To remember here, since Facebook provides you an opportunity to put visual content as well, it is best to include the mixture of both text, filled with colourful photos, insightful videos or even something interesting that you feel make sense and being relevant in context with your business.

Twitter

The micro-blogging giant, Twitter, a great platform that not only access you put your words in micro (short) form, but also allow you to access a large audience. Twitter will let you create a more concise voice as compared to any other social media; although the better you tweet, the better it will let you engage more and more audience for you.

You can even use social media engagement tools to let you speak your words and let it reach beyond a large number of audiences around the world. There are many in-house apps (See: 8 great Twitter tools that allows you tweeting like a pro) with which you can easily do this. Use social tools such as TweetDeck or Hootsuite helps more you to reach your audience in more primarily manner that you are seeking into.

LinkedIn

We all know that LinkedIn is a great resource for finding a job, but there are a lot of great ways that brands can utilize the network for marketing and networking. The advantage of using LinkeIn is that you can filter companies on the basis of size, industry and geography. Once you make, design and branded your page (See: Building your brand on LinkedIn), your page will be shown up in the search results of potential customers.

While with Facebook and Twitter, you can get feedback as well as interact with customers, LinkedIn take you a step further, allowing you to have conversations with real like-minded people. Along with that, it gives you a better way for networking, by joining groups and participating in Q&A forums that would be useful for you.

Google+

Google+ – another social product from Google after Orkut. The company is putting up a lot of real work in order to make it lovable by all. Taking it as a social media tool, many small businesses love Google+ for syndication as well as SEO purposes. This new search giant tool allows business to expand its content distribution across the web.

Even, the company recently added the Hangout feature just like Facebook and Twitter and integrating a large chunk of different Google products into in it, making as a one stop Google shop for its users.  Google’s Hangout feature will let you talk about your products, ideas, and face-to-face discussions with customers and lots more.

(Image Source: Google+ Blog)

YouTube

Another Google product and even a large number of people know it only as video-sharing site, but it is more than that. YouTube is a valuable asset for businesses across the world, with this you can share, explain and understand your potential customers in better way through a form of video. There are hundreds of video uploads every hour, a huge content set.

If you don’t know about how to start it, well, for that also there are millions of tutorials on YouTube itself to help you learn on telling you how to start. But remember it is not all about just putting up your videos, but if you really want to grab more out of it, you have to put the right strategy and engaging content but in a timely manner and you can reach a larger audience easily.

One thing, don’t expect your videos go viral every time, instead, keep a focus on how you can create and put up a quality content. Even, YouTube, now offers an option to share content across different social media like Facebook, Twitter, its own Google+, this allowing you to make the content to be shared across various streams, all in one go.

(Image Source: Main – Social Media, LinkedInYouTube TVTwitter, Featured Image @Sustainable Journalism)

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Editorial Staff at I2Mag is a team of subject experts.