Which social media sites should your company be using?
It’s undeniable: social media is one of the most important aspects of modern internet usage. However, it’s not just a useful way to stay in touch with friends and family. It is also a way to share, and it is this sharing element that makes social media so vital for internet marketing. It is important to remember that while social media won’t necessarily help on the SEO side, it is still a vital way to get people paying attention to your company and interacting with your brand. So, which accounts should you be setting up?
Setting up a company page on Facebook is one of the most common ways to get started online. You can then share the page with friends and customers to accumulate ‘likes’, and once you’ve started to build up a bit of a fan base you can share your material with them, along with other interesting information and links. For example, use it to share your blog posts and stimulate discussion about news pieces relating to your industry.
Twitter is the fastest, least formal way to conjure up interest in your company. You can use it to help and advise customers, and using a social media monitoring platform such as HootSuite can help you drop in on relevant conversations to offer suggestions. You can tweet pictures, and if you download Vine for your smartphone you can create short videos which are then shared on Twitter, which can be handy for sneak previews and quick how-to guides your followers can retweet.
Pinterest is particularly good if your business relies on visuals as it is used to share images. For example, if you are in the interior design industry, you can set up a Pinterest account to share photos of recent projects or new products which will then be ‘repinned’ by other users to raise exposure of your brand. Pinterest has blossomed, with more and more companies realising its potential as a hybrid of a social media site and a portfolio. If you’re an insurance firm, however, you don’t trade on anything visual, so don’t make an account just for the sake of it.
This isn’t a social media site as such; more ‘professional networking’, but you should definitely have a LinkedIn profile. This might be your own personal account or a page for your business. This is the minimum level of online presence you should have outside your website. It is a basic way to connect with customers and business contacts and have them endorse your company with testimonials and reviews.
Google+
Nobody is yet 100% certain exactly how Google+ affects your standing in the eyes of Google, but as the product of the world’s biggest search engine, it’s certainly a site you should consider signing up to. It isn’t yet as widely used as other social media sites, but Google appears to take notice of shares and interaction on Google+, which it doesn’t do with the others, so these are the shares that will count towards your SEO campaign.
If you need a bit of advice about the social media sites you should be using and want to increase your online exposure via social networking, get in touch with Artemis today to see how we can help.
