I was talking with a friend the other day about Social Media and some ideas for their Social Media.

And it got me thinking some more about the various Social Media platforms.

So here are a couple of thoughts on the big 4 for B2C companies.

Facebook. They announced their latest figures the other day. Staggering really. You can see them in the below post from Mark Zuckerberg:

We just announced our quarterly earnings and gave an update on our community's progress.1.49 billion people are now…

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, July 29, 2015

It is numbers like these that make most businesses with a pulse want to be on Facebook. It’s a huge audience. And it is still possible to access them relatively cheaper but it is getting more and more expensive.

The key really like with most Social Media is to try and get people off the Social Media platform and onto your own. Facebook makes this relatively easy by letting you embed sign up forms into their pages. It is worth doing and then it is worthwhile emailing your customers.

Twitter: This has long been a platform I have liked. It is large, it has advanced search and you can talk to many fascinating people. Of course they may not reply but it does let you connect with people you would never normally.

There are clever things you can do on there too for your business like do a search for anyone who might be looking for your product in a town or area. You can also follow people who will be into whatever your business does. Either by following those who follow your competitors and by tweeting about what is of interest to them.

It also works well as a customer support platform.

19% of the adult population are apparently using Twitter, so not to be sniffed at.

Instagram: This is getting bigger and bigger and now advertising is being rolled out on it so it will become much more of a marketers plaything. In many ways I think it is more of an awareness platform at the moment. So a great place to set up an account and add some brand related photos to it. Where it really shines is if you can get your customers to take Instagram photos and both use a company specific hashtag and also tag your company profile in it. For competitions this can work really well, especially if you are an interesting business. I suspect it wouldn’t work quite so well for sewage contractors or funeral homes. There again they are not really the kind of business that any Social Media can do well with.

Pinterest: Pinterest is still quite skewed towards the female demographic. This image from Sprout Social’s article on the various networks and their demographics gives you an idea. For a while Pinterest was giving the highest order values of all social media. I think it has dropped down into second or third place but for certain demographics and markets it is hard to beat.

Social-Demographics-pinterest1

Google Plus: Google Plus is something that has been predicted to disappear into the Google Graveyard. However it hasn’t. It is worth doing a few things with, if only because Google controls the Search Engines and I suspect that quality content on Google Plus that gets engaged with helps.

So there we have it a very quick view. This is for day 11 of my new world of blogging every day and as of my writing this sentence has been a bit rushed. I will be back for more.

Time spent writing: 45 minutes.
Time From Starting Writing to Finishing: 5 hours
Time Editing: 0 minutes
How Happy I am with Result: 5