In order to communicate your intended message with your target audience, you have to use the right medium. There are many companies that create a bunch of social media accounts and then post the exact same message on each one. Many sites, like Hoot Suite, have made being able to post the exact same thing on many social media sites with the click of a button very convenient. However, as convenient as it may be, these people don’t understand that different social media sites are intended for different purposes and therefore people don’t go on each one looking for the same information. These sites are specialized and have different users or simply different functions. Here’s a quick run through of the most important social media sites for your business to be on and how to use them to effectively communicate:
- Facebook: There are over 1.39 billion monthly active users on Facebook and 890 million daily users; this means that you are making a big mistake if your company is not on Facebook. You have access to Facebook Insights, their free analytics platform, if you are managing a fan page on Facebook. Facebook is a place to post almost anything: blogs, pictures, videos, etc. Every business should be on Facebook, no matter the industry. The metrics you should pay attention to on Facebook are total likes, reach (organic, paid, and viral), engaged users, “People talking about this,” and likes, comments, and shares by post.
- Twitter: With 288 million monthly active users on Twitter and 500 million Tweets sent per day, Twitter is another site that your business cannot afford to ignore. Twitter has a 140-character cap on all Tweets so it isn’t ideal for posting blogs directly but it is effective to post what your blog is about and the link. 80% of Twitter active users are accessing it from mobile devices and 77% of accounts are outside of the U.S. Metrics to pay attention to on Twitter include, followers, retweets, replies, and clicks and click-through-rate. Twitter does not provide it’s own analytics but there are many sites that do.
- YouTube: We all know that Google is the largest search engine, but did you know that YouTube is the second largest? YouTube has 3 billion searches per month and is bigger than Bing, Yahoo, and AOL combined. Obviously YouTube is specifically for videos but people go on to see videos about products before they use them or to learn things, both of which your company could be doing. Like Facebook, YouTube has an analytics platform that tracks views, channel subscribers, likes/dislikes, comments, favorites, and shares.
- Google+: G+ has an impressive 235 million monthly active user base after only launching in 2011. You just need to have a gmail account to be on G+ and once you have created that you simply follow people and add them to your circles (family, friends, acquaintances, following, or create your own). You can target who will be able to see each post by selecting the circles. G+ was Google’s attempt at an alternate to Facebook and similarly you can post anything to it and it is integrated with all of the rest of Google’s numerous features. Unlike Facebook, G+ doesn’t offer analytics so you just have to manually track the number of people who have put you in a circle, +1’s (the equivalent of a like) and comments.
- LinkedIn: There are 332 million users on LinkedIn, including 107 million in the U.S. alone. If you have a business you should have a business page on LinkedIn and you and your employees should connect their profiles to it. Paid users can see exactly who views their profile, which is a helpful resource, although you do not need to pay to have a personal or business profile without this feature. Companies use it to look for clients and potential clients use it to look for companies, so do yourself a favor and make you company a profile if you haven’t already.
- Pinterest: 80% of Pinterest’s 70 million users are women, making it the ideal place to for fashion, food, design, and travel companies to post. Posts must be visually appealing, so if you’re posting blogs on Pinterest they have to have a great picture to catch people’s attention first. Pinterest is yet to create an analytics platform so you have to manually track followers, likes, repins, and comments.
- Instagram: With 300 million monthly users, Instagram surpassed Twitter after just four years after they launched the app in October 2010. Instagram is for sharing photos and videos less than 15 seconds long. It’s useful to be on Instagram if your company is in lifestyle, food, fashion, and luxury brands. Followgram is a great tool for tracking your most liked and commented on posts.
For example, the most effective way for a car company to communicate with social media users is to post different messages on different social media sites. They should post pictures of their cars on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and G+ and they could post links to blogs on Facebook, Twitter, G+ and LinkedIn. Videos could be posted on YouTube and G+, and short videos on Twitter and Instagram.
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