Promotion is never enough. No matter how many people know about your product, to be aware of is not equal to buy a product. And finding another one channel to promote your products is always a good idea.
We all know about the popularity of social networks. A number of different people, living in various countries and spending hours on Instagram and Facebook is a fertile soil for a promotional campaign. Of course, there is no guarantee for enormous results in conversion rate. But look here! There are lots of factors allowing your business expand its client base with the help of social networks. Just imagine, officially, 2 billion users active monthly on Facebook were announced this year in June. Meanwhile, Instagram is growing up to 700 million users as Twitter crossed the line of 300 million, and none of those websites is going to stop.
The popularity of the social networks had given a birth to the opinion, that social network profile is enough for promotion. It might be truthful, but we would still consider it as an additional channel of promotion.
Choose the road to go
Social networks were created to, obviously, socialize and share different content. Spreading the information about your brand, posting special offers and communicating with your readers will influence your conversion rate only positively. In addition, it doesn’t require powerful hardware.
The daily routine of an average user turns around scrolling news feed. Your feed basically consists of content posted by your friends, communities and recommended posts. And the flow of the news is pretty quick. People aged from 18 to 25 check their Facebook as they wake up. Instagram users tend to scroll all the photos they have missed during the day. And remember, mobile notifications help users to keep up with the news all day long. That means your posts will likely be noticed.
Another thing about social networks is that promotion might seem very natural here. Let us explain: users can easily hide your content from their recommendations. Nothing prevents them from unfollowing the page they are not interested in. People are free to choose what content to consume. That is why your posts may look pretty natural in their news feed.
Some of the social networks are more suitable for promoting to your customers. Other are tooled for B2B expanding. Depending on the type of content and kind of sharing, following websites represent enormous potential:
Facebook at this point in time is the biggest social network. Facebook allows you to create not only business account but also communities. That helps you to move out the restrictions on the number of the followers. There are also no restrictions on the length of the videos and number of symbols in posts.
- Suitable nearly for companies of any size and specialization;
- Allows to share any kind of content, advertisement, events and special offers;
- Both for B2B and B2C companies;
Instagram is younger, but rapidly developing resource. The main function of it is posting photo material. In Instagram exists a restriction on the video length (1 minute) and 150 characters for text. Instagram now is a powerful promoting tool. 90% of Instagram users are younger than 35 years. 48.8% of the US brands use Instagram for promotion. So, potentially, you may promote your business to other business there.
- For companies with visual content, photos and images or short videos;
- Due to the young auditory, clothing, accessories, and lifestyle production brands are more appropriate;
- For B2C companies;
Twitter became a legendary website, that flashes in every second movie. A micro-blog platform, that allows you to post with video materials and photos. The limit of characters is 140, not counting quotes, emoji etc.
- Suitable nearly for companies of any size and specialization;
- Both for B2B and B2C companies;
Youtube is a world known the video-sharing website, that over the years has come one of the biggest promotion channels.
- Any kind of company sharing video-content;
- Both for B2B and B2C companies;
LinkedIn is an employment social network, that allows people communicate with each other, exchange with data, post job advertisement.
- Any kind of company seeking for partnership;
- Employer/employee searches, job and company descriptions;
- For B2B companies;
Google+ is a more formal alternative to the Facebook. Has professional orientation, position itself as an interest-based social network.
- For companies, that already have accounts on the other social networks;
- Allows to share different types of the content;
- Has a direct connection with other Google’s resources and technologies;
- For B2B companies;
Pinterest is a creative resource, that allows to post and share photos, that are “pinned” to special boards, representing division by thematics.
- For companies sharing visual content;
- Pinterest covers great variety of thematics, more appropriate for DIY, food, fashion, travelling and design production;
- For B2C companies.
There are no restrictions on the type of content you are going to share on the exact website. Marketers recommend using Instagram for lifestyle, food or clothes promotion. But, for example, Danish transporting company Maersk on their Instagram shares the photos of their ships. The feedback is massive and a number of the followers at the present moment is over 66 thousand. They have accounts all over the web: Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Promotion tips
Okay, let’s start with the general truth about all the social networks. Always remember, that they were not created with a promotional purpose. It means, that on every social network website there are policies violation of which will cause ban or freeze of your account.
The frequency of posting depends on the content you are going to post. And the kind of content and way of sharing differ from website to website. For example, Twitter, due to the small amount of text, may require posting several times a day. Pinterest might vary from once a day to several times a day. It is difficult to hold the place in the newsfeed ocean. For Instagram, it is more efficient to post once a day, as well as Facebook content. For resources like YouTube, once or twice a week is more realistic, as well as Google+. The most frequent posting might be on LinkedIn, that is about 2 to 4 times a week.
Most of all those websites have “business accounts” or analogue of it. It is a function for business owners to create a page for their business. In most cases, site administration provides statistics, paid promotion and advertisement.
Socialize with WordPress
If you are holding your web resource using WordPress, and planning to expand your business, here are some useful things you can possibly do.
- First of all, it is good to show to the users, that you have various social networks profiles. Plugins like Social Media Widget one will help you to create a section with your profiles. The list of the possible networks is big, and the number of functions is pretty wide to make redirection convenient.
- Allow your users to log in using their social networks accounts. It is a pretty standard, but very useful function. It helps users to quickly access your resource, not creating billions different accounts all over the web. And still, it helps you to collect their personal data. Those functions are available with the help of plugins like Social Login.
- Posting a lot of different content on various websites might be confusing and time-consuming. For that purpose mind plugins like WordPress Social Share. It allows performing cross-posting, counting the number of likes, shares and has a mobile responsive sharing interface.
- One more enormously efficient function is auto-posting. Social Auto Poster will take that routine without any complaints. The plugin works for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and BufferApp. You may post content on multiple Facebook accounts, for example, or schedule planned posting.
There are just a few mentioned. For most of those examples plugins working on other social networks are easy to be found. And using all those small, but useful functions, you will make your work with social networks profiles a lot easier and faster.
As the conclusion
Social networks acquire more and more spheres of usage. Nearly every big web resource has a page on the social networks. All the social media and entertainment portals. Every public figure and celebrity is there, covering events from their life. Journalism is gradually moving to the social networks, trying to follow the publicity. And that shows that changes in the informational sphere are inevitable.
How many social network accounts do you use? Do you consider promotion on social networks fully enough?