Are you planning to start social media marketing effectively? Well, you are in the right place here.
Before starting your campaign you should learn clearly to determine which social media platforms are suitable for your proper branding. So we shortly discussed here 9 types of social media and how each can benefit your business. Keep reading till the end.
9 Types Of Social Media To Grow Your Business
1. Social Networking Sites
Examples: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
How they can benefit your business: It is becoming a very popular way to get in touch with customers via social media networks. Using social media networks you can easily identify the potential customers and find out their problems to solve.
Those mediums could be considered as market research tools, where a company also can create brand awareness, lead generation, build relationships, provide customer service, and so on.
2. Online Discussion Forums
Examples: Quora, Reddit, and Digg
How they can benefit your business: A lot of people like to get the solutions to their problems by discussing things on forums, and those are the oldest types of social media that people were used to.
Like social media platforms, these networks can be excellent resources for your market research. You can suggest them and also advertise on them for particular things. Using this type of platform you can make more interaction with your potential customer.
3. Image Sharing Sites
Examples: Pinterest, Instagram, and Imgur
How they can benefit your business: A single image can say more than a thousand words if you can make it properly. For instance, infographics are becoming very popular nowadays to describe things within a single picture.
You can get a lot of visitors through your Pinterest account and similar social media platforms by making eye-catching images that can solve someone’s problems. It is not all about website visitors, the most important thing is making brand awareness.
4. Video Hosting Sites
Examples: YouTube, Instagram Stories and Reels, Facebook Watch, and TikTok
How they can benefit your business: Video can describe things more deeply, so these types of social media are preferable for some audiences to get the solutions to their problems more precisely. Like image-sharing sites, video-sharing sites can also bring lots of visitors to your website as well as create brand awareness.
Instead of reading text, some people prefer to watch videos, whereas some people prefer both. So it is still a major option to fulfil your social marketing goals like increasing brand awareness, making relationships, audience engagement, and so on.
More reactions to videos reflect more popularity and strength, so for example, it is important to get fast TikTok likes to attract audiences.
5. Disappearing Content Formats
Examples: Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, LinkedIn Stories, and Snapchat
How they can benefit your business: This type of social media content basically lasts for only 24-hours, and it is a recent invention and a very popular medium. Stories are well-suited for posting timely content such as announcements, limited edition items, or could be live events.
This content encourages audiences to make personal contact and build up better relationships. Pools and voting systems can take place in the survey options, where you can easily identify the audience’s opinion. As time-sensitive content, users interact with it differently.
6. Consumer Review Networks
Examples: Yelp, Zomato, TripAdvisor, and Trustpilot
How they can benefit your business: Consumer review networks give people a place to review brands, businesses, products, services, and so on. Positive reviews bring social proof to your claims, that is how a new user can get confidence to use your product or services.
Reviews are the type of social media content that adds a lot of value to many websites and online services because they focus on what exactly the product is. It’s crucial for your brand to have the ability to attract positive user reviews to make more trust as well as handle negative ones.
7. Blogging Networks
Examples: WordPress, Tumblr, and Medium
How they can benefit your business: Blogging and publishing social media networks give people to publish content online without creating a personal website. Content marketing can be a highly effective way to get potential audiences.
If your promotion strategy includes content marketing, you can promote your brand on different blogging platforms to build your brand, and generate leads and sales. Where a blog doesn’t just help increase awareness of your brand, it can also help carve out a niche for you.
8. Social Media Live Streams
Examples: YouTube, Instagram Live Rooms, Facebook Live, and TikTok
How they can benefit your business: Live streamings are similar to video-sharing, but the key difference is that live streams show real-time happenings. By using it you can describe your product or services, and you can solve users’ problems instantly by responding to their comments.
The updated versions of live streaming allow multiple people to join together, so you can invite an expert to represent your brand along with you. It could be a discussion or question and answer session, where users can ask their questions.
9. Sharing Economy Networks
Examples: Airbnb, Uber, Foodpanda and Taskrabbit
How they can benefit your business: Sharing economy networks are also called collaborative economy networks, where people connect for advertising, finding, sharing, buying, selling, and trading. For instance, if you operate food services, Foodpanda could help you find customers.
This online model of social media for peer commerce has become more popular in recent years because people started relying on online reviews and feeling pleased using those services. While most marketers will find these networks too specifically, you might want to look into them as another channel to generate leads and sales to new products or services.
Conclusion
Hope you can realize these 9 types of social media and how each can benefit your business in different ways. If you select the wrong platform and start a campaign forcefully, all your effort will be ruined.
One simple thing that can solve this issue, is just take an experiment before running a campaign. However, it can take time to get the expected results from social media, you should keep patience and stay tuned.
