There are hundreds of social media tools to choose from with new ones being created everyday – offering an almost endless array of choices. So how do you know which ones to choose for your business? The answer is, that depends (not helpful I know), but here’s a list of the top social media tools I suggest my clients use for business.
Facebook – just reaching its 1 billionth member at the start of 2012 (yep, that’s with a B) – so anyone who’s still humming and hawing about whether it’s a passing fad is pretty well tarred with the laggard’s brush (but better late than never, huh!) Although lots of people still think of it as only for personal interaction with real friends and family, its use is changing with the addition of business pages and business groups.
LinkedIn – an absolute must have for your business and your personal brand. But don’t link to your friends if they’re not business contacts. If you run a business, make sure you’ve got yourself a business profile.
Twitter – currently only 13% of people engage on twitter, so if you’re there, you’re an early adopter. Although it started as banal chatter, many, many people and businesses use it well for business and profile building.
Blogs – are great for giving your potential customers a feel for who you are as a business (or you can talk about your profession/craft) and can be key word rich – which is important for your SEO efforts. It can either be within your site or you can use an external blog site like wordpress or blogger. Blogs situated within your website are best to improve your site’s SEO. But if you want to own a google page for your brand, having an external site will help you along too.
Videos on YouTube – the world’s 2nd largest search engine after google and google ranks video exceptionally highly (actually currently ranks video content as being around 32x more valuable than regular content). You can post vodcasts, how to’s, highlights from your latest event or even training clips.
Meetup – this tool demonstrates the real power of social media. Pick an interest, seemingly any one at all, and you’ll find a group of people who regularly get together face-to-face to discuss, practice, create, engage, meet, etc. And for business, that means groups of folks who are potential customers, hanging out in one space.
Google+ – one of the newer kids on the block and the jury seems to be still out on this one.
Wikipedia – but you need to be careful with this one. There are rules that go with this game. Info must be factual and non-promotional in nature.
Webinars, podcasts, slideshare, Flickr, Instagram and a host of others – and yes, there’s an app for just about all of that.
If you’ve had success with any other social media tools for your business please feel free to share. Or if you’d like help, getting set up or having someone manage it more strategically and consistently for you, please give us a call (02) 9994 8005
