Social media is ubiquitous these days. We see companies employing social media advertisements in radio, commercials billboards, websites and even on our mobile phones and other mobile devices. We can see logos for Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr at the end of hundreds of websites. It is suggested that we join blogs, become friends, followers share, and interact in a variety of ways. But how does this help us are these companies achieving tangible outcomes?
Since the list of different types of social media platforms as well as the variety of advantages and disadvantages to using them can be overwhelming, we've decided to take a few that we believe to be the most beneficial and describe some of their pros and cons from a business point view. It is important to keep in mind that not every business should be spending their time and money on one of these platforms. Therefore, it is important to determine just what your desired outcomes are prior to launching an online campaign. After that, you can determine the type of social media program that you'd like to include in your SEO strategy by weighing the potential profit and expenses of every platform.
Blogs -The first step is to start with blogs, since they are widely considered to be the "base" of any social media campaign. Blogs can add the personality of your site and increase the perception of your business, help educate others by demonstrating your market knowledge as well as create an emotional stake in your business, increase brand awareness, and more. Additionally, blogs can be integrated with different types of social media platforms and you can even make your Facebook posts or Twitter streams live on your social media blog.
Blogs come with a drawback. They should be just as real to the readers just as they are for customers. The readers will tell if they are trying to fake your knowledge of the industry if you have too much emphasis on you rather than them and also whether or not you're involved in your blog frequently. As such, blogs should be frequently updated and this can be a challenge from a time perspective. It is important to take this into consideration prior to deciding whether to start a blog for your company.
Facebook - One of the current most popular and widely used social networks is Facebook. Although trends come and go, Facebook should be the second social media tool used after blogging, due to the fact that it boosts brand awareness to the next level by making your company's logo visible and allowing people to share information about your company to all of their "friends". People who become your fans are often informed of your existence through posts, status updates and other interactions. Furthermore, Facebook provides an analytics tool for companies to see weekly reports detailing new fans and interactions, and types of actions taken on their pages. Facebook also allows you to make custom tabs that permit you to connect to other platforms like Twitter as well as blogs on your Facebook profile.
The drawback of Facebook is that it can take time to keep a corporate page. However, this is much less than Twitter.
Twitter - As stated above, lots of time and energy are required to successfully manage the Twitter account. It can be difficult to keep up with all the people talking about your company or product. There are 27.3 million tweets per hour. To maximize optimization and other variables, it is crucial to consider many factors, such as the necessity of quick responses or "retweets", keeping a high "follower-to-follower" ratio, and having a number of other variables.
The upside is that Twitter allows users to use applications like TweetDeck to monitor tweets or schedule tweets for distribution. Twitter is a fantastic way to reach clients. However, this feature can only be used in certain industries and must be used with a strategy.
YouTube - Yes, YouTube is considered a social media platform. It is the second-most used search engine behind Google. Yes, we did say "search engine". YouTube is utilized this way predominantly by young people, not those with the resources to buy. YouTube is a popular advertising and informational tool. The typical time to visit is around 23 minutes. The benefits of maintaining an active YouTube presence on social media include an enormous number of users for companies with an extremely tight budget, as well as the ability to "tag" keywords in videos so that you will stand a better chance of being seen when your terms are searched. As with the other social media platforms that we've discussed, various elements play a part however, if your business has already produced video creative that you can use on your blog or website It is simple to create a YouTube social media account and reach more of a wider audience, especially considering YouTube's time limitations are smaller on company resources as compared to other types of social media sites.
As with all social media platforms, what is popular today may not be in the future. To boost brand recognition and keep a good image online and offline, companies should be able decide where to invest their time and resources. This conservative and well-thought-out approach can help companies prepare for the next stage of social media platforms or any other type of media that becomes the "next big thing". These factors must be considered by the search engine marketing companies and their customers when making decisions regarding how and when to continue marketing efforts.
