Social Media Sites to Boost your Business: the Best and the Rest

Want to connect with your customers and communicate to them directly? The rise of social media makes custom targeting easier — and faster — than ever. But what platforms will perform the best and give you the results you’re looking for? All social media is not created equal, especially when it comes to promoting and growing your business. Let’s take a look at the best sites…and the rest.

The Best

FACEBOOK

When you think of social media, you think of Facebook, and with good reason. From its humble beginnings in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room, Facebook has grown into a multi-billion-dollar company with more than 1.4 billion active daily users.

Facebook is a great way for a small business to advertise products or events. You can gather more leads, lower your marketing expenses, reach a targeted audience, build brand loyalty and increase your web traffic.

Quick Tip: Optimize your post timing. The best time to post on Facebook for most organizations is early afternoon during the weekday.

TWITTER

To tweet or not to tweet? With more than 100 million active daily users, Twitter can help your message go viral and keep your customers engaged. Post business updates, news, events, special offers and more. Use hashtags to make it easier for users to find and follow your tweets.

Quick Tip: Use Twitter polls and ask questions. Increase engagement by encouraging your audience to share their opinions, thoughts, and views.

YELP

The leader in review sites, Yelp is a crowd-sourced review forum with more than 140 million active users. It’s the go-to site for customers who want to quickly find out about a business — especially a restaurant or retail establishment. Positive reviews can help promote your business and build customer confidence in your brand.

Quick Tip: Yelp users may search with different keywords; make sure to include details about your business or service so you can be found easily.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram is a free mobile photo and video sharing app with over 500 million daily users. It can be used to highlight products, but you can also use the site to share business accomplishments, events, parties and more with followers. Used in conjunction with Facebook and Twitter, Instagram is a powerful promotion tool.

Quick Tip: Instagram lets you connect your other profiles so that new posts get published to those accounts automatically.

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn, which boasts more than 450 million members, is essentially your online resume. With your profile you can list your business history, mission statement, objectives and customer recommendations. LinkedIn is an important tool for networking, which in today’s competitive business climate is more important than ever.

Quick Tip: Use targeted search engine optimization (SEO) keywords in your Company page content and updates for best search results.

The Rest

GOOGLE+

While this site has never rivaled Facebook’s numbers, it’s still a Google product and the company has poured a lot of resources into it, which has a very good SEO value, especially for small businesses.

PINTEREST

Another image-based site, Pinterest has 70 million U.S.-based users. A staggering 100 billion pins have been posted since the site launched in 2010. Pinterest is used mainly by women (although 40 percent of new users are men), and pins, which can be either images or videos, drive traffic back to your website.

YOUTUBE

You might not think of YouTube as a business site, but YouTube is the second largest search engine and is owned by Google. Videos on YouTube are more likely to appear on Google’s top search results. Videos can also help promote your business, service or enhance your image.

If you need help with your social media strategy, Farmhouse Creative is here for you.