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0 Here you are, convinced of the value of social media by our prior blog post, fired up and ready to create some social buzz. Questions arise: What platform should I use? What should I say? Who is my audience? Here’s a quick guide to my 5 favorite social media sites and how to use them to your advantage.
Instagram is my personal favorite – with limited caption space and the opportunity to get creative with the photos you use, it can be a lot of fun. The secret to Instagram is the constraints they have placed upon you, the Instagrammer. With a photo and a few words to get your message across, you’re forced to get creative. Unlike Facebook, and many other social media sites, there are some very stringent limitations.
Instagram is a great platform to pique interest and grab attention; it is there to accentuate or give a touch of new information, not tell you the whole story in one go.
Creating a solid LinkedIn profile for your business is probably the most simple and straightforward strategy. Due to the very upfront nature of its purpose (networking) there’s no need to beat around the bush. I like to use LinkedIn as a platform for longer explanations of a business’s objective, as well as its values.
LinkedIn blog posts are a great way to give a voice to your company in long form – it’s the opportunity to elaborate on ideas you might only hint at when posting on other social media platforms.
Google+
Ah, the Facebook of Google! Don’t neglect this guy, there are plenty of reasons to keep up your presence on Google’s social media platform. For one thing, Gmail is one of the most popular email services in the world with 1.2 billion active users as of July 2017. That’s a huge market of folks, plenty of whom may not be active users of other social media platforms, but due to their Gmail accounts are likely to be on Google+. Additionally, having a Google+ presence helps with SEO value, and can directly affect your search rankings and brand visibility.
I personally love the clean look and visuals of Google+ and it’s similarity to Facebook makes it easy to interchange posts between the two platforms, saving you valuable time (and we all know time is money, people!)
I find Twitter to be an awesome medium for indirectly giving a sense of a company’s brand, especially through retweeting and sharing articles. In this way, you can relay your company’s values and brand without pushing it onto your followers. Twitter is another platform that shines due to its constraints. It’s a great place to exchange information quickly and engage with a lot of people all at once.
With limited space to say something, every character counts. Like Instagram, it’s a great way to make a bit of a splash and catch your customer’s eye, hopefully drawing them to your website for more information.
Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about the big guy! I left Facebook for last because it’s usually the first social platform a business typically starts engaging. There’s nothing wrong with that! Just about every company has a Facebook page for a reason – it’s a great place to keep very relevant information for your future customers (including reviews). Facebook has a little bit of everything going on. You can post photos, share relevant stories about current events, or if you want to get really approachable, cute memes involving puppies and kittens.
I love that it’s a truly versatile space that allows the opportunity to be playful or serious, according to your company’s style. Next to LinkedIn, it offers the most square footage for expression and a more visible and verbose marketing approach.
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