There are hundreds of social networking channels now availble to choose from. However it is vital to choose the right one(s) that suit your business needs.
I have summarised and explained the main social networking channels you should consider.
Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. It is perhaps the most widely known social network as anyone with a valid email address can freely join. A business can set up a Facebook business fan page and engage convesations with your fans and customers. This can be a method of asking and fielding questions and feedback. The average age of a Facebook user is 26.
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. You can list your tweets within your website automatically. Twitter has over 40m users worldwide, average age 31.
Using YouTube to market your business is an increasing trend with over 2 billion videos being viewed each day. More recently politicians have realised the potential power social media can have with more and more parties launching YouTube campaigns in an attempt reach other demographics. These videos can be easily embedded to any part of your website to compliment the static information. The average age of a user is 35.
LinkedIn is a business social network. The purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business, communicate and engage with them. Perhaps surprisingly with 65 million users, LinkedIn has more users than Facebook. Typically the average age of a user is 40.
Incase you haven't heard, blogging is massive! If you want to encourage traffic to your site then it's a must. Let your customers and clients know your news, share your opinion and get their feedback. But more importantly blogging provides the perfect opportunity to build up rich web site content, which is exactly the type of thing search engines like Google love.