We’re going to compare 5 of the biggest social media sites right now, but you can bet there are plenty more. Let’s take a look at Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and Twitter to help you decide which ones are right for you.
Social media is important because it’s a way to engage with your audience. Engagement helps you reach the important “know, like, trust” factor that determines whether someone wants to buy from you or not. Social media is helpful for building those relationships and spreading awareness.
If you’re just starting out, don’t attempt to master all the platforms at once. Just choose one that is best for you and get experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t for reaching your audience.
So who do you know that isn’t on Facebook? Not many, I’ll bet. That means it’s probably one of the most important social networks to be on. With a reach of over a billion people and the capability to boost posts and place display ads that get results inexpensively, Facebook is an important place for your business to be.
You can bet buyers are on Facebook. It’s that simple. A wide variety of people can be found on Facebook, from your grandma to your teenager. The chances are high that your audience members visit Facebook at least one or more times during the day. Its seamless interface, whether viewed on a PC or mobile device, and ease of use is what makes it so popular.
You can interact in many ways including adding recorded video, by live streaming, using images, and text. You can build a following, post updates, network in groups, and have access to amazing native analytics. With a few clicks, you can place advertisements or pay to boost a post to reach more viewers.
Integrated with BeLive.TV you can make Facebook Live look a lot like Google Hangouts used to look. You can create private groups that you use in a membership site and charge people for entry. You can join groups and network with like-minded people easily.
Using Facebook in your business is a no-brainer. You can create a page or group for your business and build an entire community without any technical help at all. This is the one place everyone should be right now.
Visual in nature, Instagram mostly works on mobile right now, although people can view Instagram on a PC and it works with Facebook if you connect the two since Facebook owns Instagram. If you really want to upload images from your pc, of course – there’s an app for that. Go check out Gramblr. Bonus, it’s free. If you have a visual business or a way to make your business visual, Instagram is a great place to build a following for the 13 to 24-year-old age group with 25 – 34-year old’s not far behind.
More than 50 Billion images shared on Instagram. The 13 to 24-year old age group are the fastest growing user group. Any niche that is highly visual such as fashion, food and fitness can make a name for themselves on Instagram.
Snapchat (which we’ll talk about next) stores, the ability to zoom in on images, save drafts to publish later, to edit in interesting ways and to control who sees your updates are all important. Instagram also has a new feature where they allow you to create a “snapchat” like story that will disappear after the viewer sees it.
The visual, micro nature of Instagram makes it easier to be social because you can focus on engagement. It’s user-friendly and you can cross post to Twitter and Facebook. Instagram is always coming up with new tools for businesses by adding insights and the ability to promote. It is a useful social media platform for everyone, especially if your audience is highly motivated by or interested in images.
Instagram users usually check their Instagram accounts first thing in the morning and before they go to bed at night. If you can engage your followers at these times, you’ll be far ahead of others in the know, like, and trust factors.
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Snapchat
Another social network that has a 69 percent penetration among 18 to 24-year-old group, if that’s your audience you need to be using Snapchat. Snapchat works with your mobile device and allows you to send short videos and images which disappear after a person reads them. It can also be used as a messaging app.
Everything about snapchat seems to be important these days. It’s becoming more popular with each new additional feature. The ability to create snapchat stores, send funny and interesting snaps to friends and followers makes the app fun and useful. Since users are sending 700 million snaps a day, it’s becoming more important than ever.
You can broadcast to the entire world or you can broadcast only to your followers or specific people. You can save short clips to your “stories” for 24 hours to help people get to know you better. For example, you can tell the story of your business startup or a “day in the life” behind the scenes.
One thing clear about snapchat is that young people love it. Millennials, people in the 18 to 34-year-old group, are the fastest growing group. If you want to attract this group, being on snapchat is the best place to be visible. The best thing about it is the ability to create stories. The stories stick around for 24 hours and they can be sent to particular people, your entire following, or streamed to the public. It’s also a great video calling app.
Snapchat cares about privacy and sends an alert to users if someone is taking screenshots of their snaps. Whether you want to build a huge following for your business or talk to your sister while she’s interning in China, it’s a very useful social network.
This website is a place users can upload images called “Pins” and other media content including videos into collections called “pinboards”. While users browse each other’s feeds, they can comment, re-pin, and share the work of others, depending on the board’s permissions. This is an awesome way to highlight quotes, recipes, projects, or make a dream board.
With close to 200 million people using Pinterest you can’t ignore it for your business. When you browse other people’s pinboards, you can get ideas fast about how you can use this system to promote your business and products. Pinboards last forever so you can easily create different boards over time that becomes very special and focused. Since more content comes from business than other social networks, Pinterest users are also primed to buy.
Native video, cinematic pins, promoted pins, promoted video and more all make Pinterest very business friendly. With trackable links, they’re serious about helping businesses get more traction with their followers.
A neat feature is that you can see who is pinning from your site. Plus, there are groups and ways to network on Pinterest that up the social quotient exponentially for Pinterest. You can use Pinterest as easily from your mobile device as your PC too which makes it almost as easy as Facebook to use.
Pinterest is more visual than some of the other social platforms but they make it easy to use, easy to earn money by allowing you to sell products direction on the platform, and by coming out with new features continuously that seem to be business focused.
If you don’t know the power of 140 characters yet, then you need to get on Twitter. This social media network enables individuals and businesses to share and communicate messages with each other on a frequent basis using 140 characters of text, images, and video. You can even stream live using Periscope to Twitter.
If you’re interested in improving your branding, connecting with customers, marketing to more people, and essentially increasing your ROI then Twitter is an important network you should be involved in. Some people report better results for some types of Tweets and promoting them than on Facebook. In addition, it’s being used as a search engine by users with more than 2 billion searches daily.
Twitter cards, tailored audiences, conversion tracking, and even the 140-character maximum for a Tweet are all features that help business owners. You can even use custom timelines so that the exact Tweets you want to show up for your followers can be seen. Hashtags are also important features because it enables you to increase engagement.
Did you know that you can use Twitter Archives and download all your Tweets from day one? Want to know what’s happening right now? Look at Trending Topics. This is also a good way to find out what’s important for the day so you can tie in your content to it.
These social media platforms are important to your business because that’s where your audience is. It’s imperative to go to where your audience is to tell them about your offerings. They’re not going to come to you without you going to them first.
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