Choosing the correct social media marketing channel to use for marketing purposes in your business shouldn’t be a hard decision once you understand and know what each platform does. In my experience, one platform won’t be enough so you should at least target 2-3 channels even if you are only going to use one primary one to add some variety to your marketing mix.
When you use multiple platforms to engage with your community, your exposure online will be much bigger than only using one. The only problem is that using more than one social media channel takes time, but with a little understanding of how these channels work, it shouldn’t add to much strain on your daily marketing tasks.
Here’s 2 social media channels you can immediately start using – Facebook and Twitter
Facebook is the behemoth of all social media channels and it’s only getting bigger everyday. Facebook is a great channel if you are interested in publishing and using visual content in the form of images, infographics, videos and even podcasts. When you post a new update on Facebook, it filters through your communities news feed at slow rate. While text only posts can get the attention of your community, visual content works better.
With Facebook you should always try to optimise your content so that it’s visually appealing and will catch the attention of the people you are trying to reach. Publishing great content on Facebook has a chance to be shared by your community and be shared again. It’s like a snowball getting bigger and bigger. Social media is all about sharing so by creating great content, your content can be shared and create more exposure for your brand, services or products.
Twitter is a great real time social media channel that you can use to connect to basically anyone with a Twitter account. The power of Twitter lies in it’s real time nature and to see this in action visit Twitter search. Another great benefit of Twitter is the fact that Tweets has now been integrated into Google’s search algorithm so valuable Tweets stands a chance of being indexed which will yield more exposure to your business.
With Twitter you have only 140 characters to post an update. If you are going to share a link, that makes it 119 characters because the shortened link with a space is 21 characters. Think creatively and use relevant hashtags with your updates to get the conversation going.
Social media is massive, but before you decide on your primary social media channel to use, start using Facebook and Twitter and measure the results to see what will work for your business.
