Which social media sites should you use?

John Murray +

Creating content for lots of social media sites can be time consuming and counter-productive for your business. It is usually better to work smarter rather than harder, and concentrate on the top five sites.

Facebook

Facebook is the number one network, with over one billion active users. It is used by all age ranges and income levels, but has more female users than male. Use by the older generation has increased over the last few years. Content on Facebook needs to be both visual and text.

Twitter

Twitter is the next most popular social media platform and is defined by its 140-character limit for tweets. A recent survey revealed that 39% of Twitter users preferred to hear from businesses via Twitter rather than other social platforms. This means that, whilst it is not a good idea to directly sell on social media sites, Twitter users are more open to marketing orientated messages.

Google +

Google + has taken a while to take off, but now has over 550 million users. Users are mostly male and tend to be students, professional interested in technology, bloggers or photographers. Communities are big on Google Plus, so you need to find ones related to your business and connect with them.

LinkedIn is targeted at older, educated, professionals. It has a user base of around 280 million. You need to create a company page aimed at these users, as you can use it to not only for marketing purposes, but for recruitment too.

Pinterest is a site for sharing visual content, and has a high proportion of female users. If your business or brand has a strong visual appeal, then Pinterest is an ideal platform to promote your business through stimulating images.

A successful social media marketing campaign creates high quality content targeted at the five main social media sites.

John Murray

John is every inch the wordsmith and loves a game of Scrabble above all else. With experience writing for newspapers, John’s time at university was spent studying Creative Writing – something which comes across in his love of the pun.