Is a social media presence necessary for your business? Yes, but you have to be smart about it. Not every social media platform is best for every business. But there are several outlets that every business should consider due to their popularity and reach. Here are the ones we believe are worthy of every business’s consideration.
With over a billion users, Facebook is far and away the most popular social media platform. For a B2C company that wants access to a wide audience, this is still the place to go; however, in recent years it has been hard to get results as strong as those possible in previous years. Facebook’s advertising models have pretty much turned the site into a pay-to-play platform if you want a lot of reach. Still, it is possible to grow a Facebook following organically if you can encourage people to participate through other platforms.
YouTube
YouTube may not seem like a social media platform on the surface, especially if you never look at the comments. But video is the highest-performing type of content on the web. If you have a video team on your staff or are willing to learn videography on your own, YouTube can host your videos. Then you can share them on your other social media channels to leverage the power of this high-performing tool.
Twitter is ideal for starting conversations and answering client questions. Therefore, if you want to be popular on Twitter, you need someone dedicated to answering tweets and seeking out hashtags relevant to your business. It’s a very active and fast platform—the average lifespan of a tweet is just 18 minutes! Unless you’re willing to sink the time into making your presence quite active, your business won’t get much value directly from Twitter. But if you love chatting with your client base, there’s no better platform.
Pinterest used to be the odd duck out of the social media bunch, but businesses have found ways to use it for effective advertising, as business mentor Scott Vollero discusses in this post.
Pinterest is still the most popular social media site for women. If you can show off your product, show people loving your product, or show the results of people who use your service, you can get a foothold on Pinterest. Pinterest also makes a great content hub for sharing on Twitter and Facebook.
Your business blog
The one disadvantage of the platforms above is that it’s hard to communicate a lot of information effectively. Video is catching up, but some people prefer to get their information by reading rather than listening. If you want to be seen as a thought leader in your niche, you have to write lengthy content with actionable information.
The best place to do that is on a business blog. The latest trend is for pieces to be quite long for maximum return value—a blog post length of 2,250–2,500 words is the new sweet spot. This may sound like a lot, but a once-per-week or even once-per-month post of a lengthy and high-quality article should be sufficient to get people to visit your site again and again.
There are other platforms to consider as well. For example, B2B businesses must be on LinkedIn, and if you’re targeting millennials, Snapchat is worth your attention. But the social media outlets mentioned above are the core five that every business should look at first. Not all will be worth your time, and in fact, it’s best to master one or two platforms before joining a new one to avoid getting overwhelmed. But they are all worthy of consideration.