Top Three Social Media Sites to Focus Your Attention On

I’m often asked by small business owners; which social media sites should I use. The answer isn’t as straight forward as you might think, for instance you have to take into consideration your audience and were your audience hangs out. But, there are three social media sites that any business can use.

Twitter

This is definitely the top social media site that you need to be using, no matter what type of business you have, in fact let me be crystal clear on this, if you have a business you should be actively using Twitter. Twitter is truly a universal social media site, your business can be small or large, and you can benefit from being greatly by being active on Twitter.

The best thing to do is to get started is to develop your profile and then start and join in conversations that are related to your niche. You want to actually interact directly with your customers, leads, prospects, and even brands that might be your competition.

Twitter is the type of platform where you want to post or comment on something many, many times during a day as the life of a tweet is typically less than eight minutes. You can use a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to help you schedule posts, but you’ll still need to get online to respond, retweet, and engage with people on Twitter. If you’re not part of the conversation surrounding your niche on Twitter, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to grow your business and become an influencer in the eyes of your audience.

Facebook

This is another social network that literally everyone can use, no matter the niche you are in. In fact, if you can’t find your audience on Facebook, your audience doesn’t exist. You can share all types of content, from images, to videos, to text.

On Facebook you don’t want to share or post too often unless you’re in an active conversation. They say that posting business related information more than twice a day is considered obnoxious on Facebook, but then I believe rules are meant to be broken as long as you monitor your response rates and know what works for you and your niche.

You can use software like SproutSocial.com, however Facebook have their own power editor that lets you schedule posts for business pages and I would recommend using this at least at the start. It’s very useful and helpful. Facebook also has wonderful community-building tools that you can’t beat elsewhere.

YouTube

This social network might seem like it’s only for visually pleasing niches, but the truth is you can use it for any niche. If you have something you want to teach others, you can use it. If you want to simply use it to interview people, you can do that.

You don’t have to post daily to get YouTube to work for you, but post at least weekly for the best results. Of course, more often up to daily is always better on YouTube. Not only can you build an audience on YouTube, you can also earn extra income through the views and linking back to your website.

YouTube is a great way to show off your expertise and knowledge. If you really want to be known as a mover and shaker, YouTube is for you. It works great for all sorts of niches to help people build up their expertise status.

These three social media networks are awesome and you should be using them. But, there are others like Instagram, great for visually pleasing brands, and the newer Blab.im that are very promising for many different types of businesses. I’m also a big fan of LinkedIn which again you should check out, the best thing to do is to be on the social media sites if your target audience is there. Whilst remembering that if you are passionate about one social media site over another you’ll often work harder to succeed on that, as your passion will drive you towards success.