Top 5 Social Media Sites For Online Marketers & Bloggers

When you are a small business, online marketer or a blogger who is working online, it’s a requisite to be online to market yourself and your product. If you are not visible on social-media sites, that means you are not doing the online marketing the way it should be done. Like Television and print-media in older time, it’s the social media sites which are your best bet to get the idea spread about your work and what you do. In recent years, a lot of new social-media sites came into existence, and with limited-time you have to be particular about what social media sites you should be using. Every social media service has something different to offer for online marketers and huge audience base for each of these websites is a huge bonus for online advertising.

Every time I log into my Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn profile, it is often flooded with advertising messages from various companies.  I found some of them interesting for me and some totally of no value, therefore I delete them.  It is therefore, always be kept in mind that creating a relevant audience is very important.  Online marketer must take care of certain things for making an impact through their social networking channel.

• Read: Benefits of Social-media marketing in Blogging
• Benefits of Social media for businesses

Things to do on a social media networks

I would like to suggest some basic and easy tricks for online marketers who wish to make it count on social media networks:-

• Create and organize a distinct brand name for your company or business. Most of these social-media sites I have listed, understand the importance of branding, and they offer tools like pages, communities to market your brand.

• Search for audience which will be of help to increase your marketing efforts instead of simply adding people to your network.

• Manage your campaigns with attractive images and engaging contents. Do remember, social-media is all about being social and connecting to your existing user base and finding new prospects.

• Seek feedback from your audience in order to keep improving for future.

List of social media sites for online marketers

When you will look for social media networks there are many now, but you must pick the one’s which have proven themselves in the online marketing.  I am making my list of 5 social media networking sites, which you should be focusing on.

1. Facebook

Facebook is the number one social networking website in the world with a staggering 1.19 billion active users which was recorded in September 2013. By the end of 2014, experts are expecting Facebook to reach 2 billion users milestone. You might have heard of teens in U.S. not using Facebook,, but what you missed is; at the same time a great percentage of user above 40+ joined Facebook, and these are the people with buying capacity. This amazing figure inspired many businesses to create personalized campaigns targeted for their customers.  Why Facebook is a good platform for your brand promotion?

• You can create a unique page for your brand promotion.  Try to choose your page name carefully, as once you have selected one you won’t be able to change it.  So it’s better to claim the best name that you want.

• One Facebook page carries your business’s complete profile.  This step is very crucial, as this will be the first thing that your connections will see, therefore, take your time to write bio-data for your business page.

• Promote your business logo in the page thumbnail and this thumbnail will be the sign which will create identity of your business.  Also take advantage of cover image to leave a great impact on your audience. Here are tips to make your Facebook page popular.

• While creating this page, you will have option to enter your contact and company information, which will give direct access of your company to your customers. You also have liberty to choose the business category your business belongs to.

• On this page you can add more page administrators, which will allow other users to manage your contents and posts, even when you are busy in other works.

2. Google +

Google+ is the social networking service from Google Inc.  This networking service had more than 540 million active users in October 2013, which surely have increased by now.  In last one year, Google is integrating Google+ with all it’s existing Google products, and the number of users are rising every day. What makes Google plus important is, deep integration with Google search. Google authorship is one big example of this. Apart from SEO benefits, Google plus is the best social-networking site to connect and network with like-minded people. What you get from Google+ networking? Let’s see.

• Google+ also allows you to create pages for your brand identity.

• You get customizable cover template and thumbnail for your brand.

• There is scope for providing details of your business including contact, website, and geographical location of your business.

• Search your prospects around the globe with specific keywords and location.

• Manage your contacts in different circles, which will provide you to categorize your audience.

• Get your Google+ page unique URL for your brand.

• You will get access to range of various webmasters and API console services along with your Google+ page, which will allow you to broadcast your brand on other online platforms.

3. LinkedIn

With a network of 259 million users, LinkedIn is the most popular professional networking website.  This networking service provides you to create a professional profile and manage your connections by your own, within your professional capacity.  LinkedIn also is capable of creating brand identity for your product.  We will see what it has on offer.

• You can create a group for your brand and promote it within your connections.

• It has option to personalize your brand’s group in your way.

• Get new connection suggestions out of your existing connections and build your network within your professional networking preference.

• You can use search feature to find new prospect clients for your business.

• LinkedIn will enable you to add related and useful connections to your professional networking.

4. Twitter

Twitter is a network of 230 million users.  Limitation of 140 characters per tweet surely is an advantage in bringing out best of your creativity.  At an average Twitter receives 500 million tweets every day.  All popular celebrities, personalities, businesses, networks, and events are active on Twitter.  What added benefit you will get?  Check out.

• With Twitter you can claim for the unique URL of your profile. Ex: @Technododo

• This is an account where you can personalize profile image, header image and background fitting to your business.

• You can attach your business website, which will become a readymade access link to your website.

• Open access to Twitter 101, a guideline of hash tags (#), @ messages and replies and best of Twitter network practices to follow.

• Twitter API widget to place on your business website.

5. Pinterest

Pinterest is the best social bookmarking service with 70 million users by November 2013.  This is a board-style image-pinning networking service, where you can list your business or company for online marketing.

• You can create a business profile on this network.

• Pinterest allows you to create profile with a personalized username for your business.

• You can connect other social networking profiles with Pinterest account in order to display your activity on them. I usually link my Facebook with Pinterest account, and when ever I Pin a new image, it automatically shares it on my Facebook.  You can check my Pinterest profile here.

Well, I don’t find Pinterest to be suitable for all kind of online-marketing, but with then growing user-base you need to tap this social-networking site for your online marketing needs. Here at ShoutMeLoud, guest authors have shared two amazing post to get most out of Pinterst, which you can find below.

Industry experts are also hopeful for the growth of MySpace, but that’s more centric to independent music producer and more targeted to music-industry. I also wanted to add Youtube here, but that’s not a truly social-media site, but you should have a strong presence on Youtube. Along with this, don’t miss out the sites like Vine, Instagram which have great potential in coming days.

As a blogger, I highly recommend you to have your brand presence on all the above mentioned social-media sites, and have strong foot-print on Facebook and Google plus atleast. Do remember, a huge number of online marketers are tapping above mentioned social-media sites for their success and profit, and you just need to develop a strategy that works for your product and for your brand.

Do you think I missed any important Social-media site for online marketing here? If yes, do share it with me via comments. Dont forget to share this article with friends on your favourite social-media site.

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