There are so many social media sites it’s hard for the average person to know which one is right for their business. Really, it comes down to your goals – what are you hoping to achieve with your social media marketing.
The chart below gives you an overview of what benefits you can have from each of the various sites.
Some sites are really useful for communicating with your customers. For example Comcast is well known for using Twitter to provide customer service.
This is useful if you have someone dedicated to monitoring Twitter and is able to respond quickly. If you’re a one-person shop and don’t want to be tethered to your computer/smart phone then maybe this isn’t a strategy for you.
Social media can be excellent for brand exposure, particularly for large corporations. However, for small and micro businesses, having a large reach on social media isn’t realistic unless you’re willing to invest a lot of time into your marketing.
Some sites are better than others at sending traffic to your website.
For many of you, this should be one of your goals with your social media marketing. You want to get people off of social media and onto your website or into your store. Therefore a site like Flickr isn’t likely to be much good to you and your business.
Finally, using social media to get yourself ranked higher in the search engines like Google (known as SEO) is one of the main reasons a lot of people get involved with social media marketing. But not all sites are created equal when it comes to SEO. None of the sites list here are terrible at SEO but some are better than others.
In my opinion Google Plus is the star at providing SEO benefits. One site you might not want to overlook if SEO is your goal is Slideshare. I’ve been surprised at how well it works with my own SEO efforts and I’ve put very little effort into this site.
Let me know if you agree with the assessment of this chart by leaving a comment below.
