Best Social Media Sites for Marketing

The plethora of social media sites that have come up in recent years (an estimate says there are more than 100) has made life exciting but also confusing. Which of these sites is good? They can’t, after all, be equally useful. Or assuming they’re all good, which of these can be categorized as the best among them, when it comes to marketing your business or products.

For start-ups and small businesses, in particular, it’s important to know how good or bad a social media site is before you start using one. While theoretically speaking, you can get on board as many as possible, on a practical plane, however, that’s not really feasible. So it’s best advised to focus on a few really good ones, and concentrate all your energies in building your marketing content on those.

Facebook

Just a dozen years into business, this social media site, created by a group of college students, continues to be popular around the world, with its millions of active users. And it’s easy to use too. Creating a page on FB is quite a breeze, and you can virtually create as many as you like to promote as many businesses as you wish to. Liking and sharing the pages is ease personified.

Twitter

Though basically a micro-blogging site, this came up around the same time as FB and continues to gain strength, and users, year after year. Crisp posts, thanks to the character limitation, make it a buzzing and vibrant social media site. The only drawback, compared with FB, is that the audience in this is not targeted since you need to wait for them to follow you.

YouTube

When it comes to video sharing, YouTube takes the cake, with hundreds of videos being uploaded every minute. What more can an entrepreneur or a small businessman ask for, in terms of free marketing and promotion?

Google+

With Google+, you can be assured of an edge that most other social media sites can’t even begin to compete with. The transition from a mere search engine to a social media site has been slow for Google, but when Google+ came, it came with a bang, and continues to make a lot of noise in the social media circuit.

LinkedIn

Not everyone does business. There are a lot of professionals around who also need to promote themselves and their services. LinkedIn was launched in 2003 to address the marketing needs of professionals and has grown into a huge community where finding jobs, and projects or assignments, becomes easy.

Quora

Once upon a time, LinkedIn had a feature for Answers, where you could find answers to questions relating to small businesses. Now that feature no longer exists, which created a vacuum that Quora has successfully filled for small business owners.

Pinterest

If it’s visual marketing that you’re looking for, then Pinterest is your best choice. It’s a photo sharing site which is styled on a vision board. As the name suggests, you simply create boards and pin your stuff on it, for the world to see.

Affluence

If you haven’t heard of it blame it not on your lack of social media savviness but on your lack of affluence. Yes, you heard it right. This is an exclusive social media site for the really affluent, and naturally, it’s very private, given that the eligibility for becoming a member is an income range of “verifiable minimum household net worth of $1 million (US) or annual household income of $200,000.”

No wonder the owners call it “a private social network where accomplished individuals connect, share information, and engage in meaningful conversations.”

Conclusion

These are a few of the better known or more popular social media sites which you can leverage to promote your business interests through targeted marketing. The list, of course, is not exhaustive and you’ll come across many more such sites. Whichever site you pick up you need to figure out how to get the best out of it.

Interestingly, there are sites that tell you how to do that too. For instance, if it’s Facebook you want to use for your marketing, a good place to begin is Social Media Business Blueprint.

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