The top social media sites for business are Facebook and Twitter as we all know, but in addition, these are the 3 best social media sites for businesses to grow their traffic and gain more customers:
Pinterest has become a fast growing social sharing website with over 11 million users since its establishment in 2009. Today, the average time users spend on Pinterest is 1 hr and 17 mins more than the average amount users spend on Twitter. Pinterest allows users to “pin” digital content they find interesting, but in an organized way and allows others to follow one or more “boards” geared towards a particular category of interest. The user can also “repin” an existing pin from another user and share on their account much like Facebook sharing.
Pinterest has helped so many businesses create more traffic on their website that they have created a strictly business oriented account on business.pinterest.com. There businesses can set up an account to make it easy to pin products from the website and gain more exposure. There are many testimonials to the power of Pinterest marketing such as Julie Bornstein, CMO & Chief Digital Officer of Sephora, “Pinterest is the perfect venue to visually share shoppable new products, how-to’s, and cool images. It’s a place to get inspired by beauty.” With a business account you can track your pinning activity to find out how many people are pinning on your website, seeing your pins and clicking on your content.
Tumblr
Tumblr has become an important way of marketing for smaller businesses since it is still under utilized by bigger businesses, smaller business have a chance to create their own niche and attract traffic to their websites or blogs. The Tumblr community is a unique online environment that can be used to creatively tell a story and post useful information for other followers to “reblog” onto their own blogs.
Tumblr is a unique platform because its not exactly a blog like WordPress but a blog that shares images, videos, quotes, gifs and just about anything people find Tumblr blog worthy. Gifs (Graphics Interchange Format) have become more common among visual marketing on Tumblr that can be created by gif host websites by compressing image files creating moving images. Tumblr has 166 million users and a new Tumblr sales integration called BlkDot that offers an e-commerce platform on Tumblr to sell and promote the business to those users. Since much of Tumblr is visually based, it is perfect for posting images of promotional events, projects or inspirations.
Instagram has gained 150 million users recently and is in no way stopping now. The online social networking, photo-sharing platform is a mobile app for instant photo sharing allowing for users to send the content out to multiple social media channels simultaneously. The vintage- inspired filters to ma33ke mobile photographs look professional and hashtags helps categorize the picture or video to a group of similar content, which can help small business owners network and create customer relationships.
Many small businesses are now creating Instagram profiles to market new products or share expertise with their mobile device. The Instagram profile and hashtags direct customers specifically to the interest and focus of the company. With the correct use of hashtags, direct sales will come with people commenting on a picture when or where the product will be sold. Instagram can also create dialog among others in the same industry offering an opportunity to be inspired, network and build strong relationships.
Explore the business social media sites introduced here to get inspired, post away, and watch the traffic roll in!