Deciding which social media platforms to use for your marketing strategy is not always that straightforward. You have to look into each one with a lot of thought before making your decision. Do you go for a single platform, or would your needs be better suited with 2 or maybe 3 of these on your side? One platform may be absolutely perfect for one style of business but the total opposite may apply for a different type of product/service supplier. If you run a smaller operation, you may need to pool your resources into a campaign that has your budget in mind. Let’s take a look at the biggest platforms out there at the minute and see if any of them, or maybe even all of them, will suit your marketing campaign requirements.
Okay, we’ll start off with the big daddy of them all, Mr Zuckerberg’s Facebook! Some marketers have said that your business needs to be on this mega platform, no two ways about it. But we beg to differ and we have enough reasons to back up this thought process. But it does work very well if your sole aim is to build up a level of trust with your audience that may lead to meaningful traffic to your business website eventually. You are looking at encouraging your public to hang out on your Facebook Page and the longer they are engaged, the ore chance you have of something good happening. The recent introduction of Facebook Ads has actually added some traditional aspects of promotion to the social media twist.
YouTube
This extremely popular video channel is going to get even bigger in 2014 as more businesses decide to use it for their marketing campaigns. As we all know, visual content is already massive this year and what better way to promote your own brand than on the biggest visual platform there is? You can add links to your business websites at will and each time your content is shared, you’ve got another solid backlink in the Google bank. Service companies can employ the ‘how-to’ approach for some rich pickings and best of all, the whole thing is free!
If you run a technology or hospitality based business, this micro blogging platform will certainly work in your favour. High efficiency furnaces have used Twitter for their own particular brand of marketing incredibly well. You’ll have to be rather alert when dealing with the myriad of Tweets that come your way, but as long as you have the resources, this can prove to be an excellent way to connect and stay in touch with your client base.
B2B, finance, academic, and government companies are really loving LinkedIn and who could blame them? It’s a slick and professional way to pass your business cards around and some of the networking potential is amazing. Just get past the rather austere exterior and you’ll soon see that having a presence on LinkedIn could be the best thing that ever happened to your brand!
Any more?
There’s also Pinterest and Google+ to consider and we’ll talk about them in a later article – Good Luck!
Author Bio: Nancy Baker is a freelance blogger and an ace creative write with many years of experience writing for top blogs. Nancy has written on a myriad of topics and has written several posts for us.
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