Social Media Niches

Choosing the Right Social Media for Your Business

When choosing a social media platform to advertise their products and services, many business owners only look into the major ones like Facebook and Twitter. These are very useful social media websites when used correctly, but they are not the only options for promoting your business online. Social media networks like YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest may not be the most used options for social media marketing, they are powerful advertising tools when used well.

YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing community that millions of people use. While it might not immediately seem suited to social media marketing, many companies are now using videos to reach out to current and potential customers. They’re building more personal relationships with their client base and reaping the benefits of this creative indirect marketing strategy. Videos can be made relatively inexpensively and can be anything from webinars to traditional-style commercials to tutorials and product demonstrations. The key to this platform is regularly producing content, which needs to be original and interesting to your customer base. This means either spending the time to create videos yourself or hiring a creative team to produce videos for you. But once your videos are online, they’re not just restricted to YouTube. You can also embed videos on your website and share them on Facebook and other social media platforms.

Instagram

Instagram is one of the best and most-used photo-sharing social media platforms, with over 150 million users. Visual content is great for building your company’s brand and showing customers your products, especially if you are selling items that your customers would want to see before buying. Consumers want images and are more likely to respond to visual marketing like a well-crafted image than to text-based advertising. If you’re having success with photo content on other social media platforms, consider how effective your marketing will be on a site designed for visual interaction. Instagram is a free network, which means your costs are limited to the production of your photos. Photos need to be engaging, original, uploaded regularly, and targeted toward your customer base, but content that is generated for Instagram can be shared on other platforms.

Pinterest

Pinterest is arguably the most niche market of these social media platforms, but that does not lessen the impact it has. Pinterest has more than 10 million visitors and has been rapidly growing. This is essentially a web-based pin board designed to share or “pin” content that the user finds interesting. A few of the popular categories on Pinterest include crafts, wedding planning, cooking and recipes, fashion, home interior decoration, and jewelry. The content on Pinterest is visual and each pin has the ability to link to an external website. If a customer wants to know more about your company or a product, one click can take them to your website. Pinterest will not only provide you with more backlinks, but gives you the opportunity to show the customer your products, offer tips, and to demonstrate expertise in any given area. For example, a hardware store might put together a board featuring home repair tutorials, tips for gardening, and inspirational images of home decoration that feature a new brand of paint they are selling. Pinterest is a great way to foster conversations and interaction.

When setting up your social media marketing strategy and choosing which networks to use, remember to consider the social media that allow you to best connect with your potential and present customers and focus on those platforms. It is more valuable to be great at one or two than to be okay at four or five.