Leveraging changes in social media to grow your business

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By one means or another, people are now on some kind of social media network throughout the day

Social media links are now integrated into most websites. These links let us know what consumers think of an organization’s services and products, giving us greater confidence about our online decisions. All OWDT clients have websites that link to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media portals. We hope you do, as well. If not, you can be sure your competition DOES, giving them an easy, low-cost competitive advantage.

Social media trends

Savvy marketers follow social media trends carefully. Recent far-reaching changes reveal new strategies for investing your internet marketing dollar to maximize ROI.

Have you noticed the explosive growth in visual networks like Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram? Current research shows that users spend more time on Pinterest and Tumblr than they do on Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Google+ combined. Though Facebook still ‘rules’ with the majority of traffic, the power of pictures is evident across as all social media, including Facebook, devote more space to graphics, videos, and other visuals.

What does this mean for your business?

  • One simple application is to incorporate more images in your blog posts and social media communications. One case in point: sharing images on Twitter increases retweets by 150%.
  • A second strategy is to share your videos and photos in real time, taking advantage of YouTube and similar sites. Videos uploaded to YouTube do very well in search. With the emergence of micro video apps like Twitter’s Vine and Instagram’s video sharing feature, real-time video sharing is accelerating. Instagram, for example, allows 3-15 seconds per video, encouraging users to create and share more videos from their smartphones. This potentially includes testimonials for your products and services!

By one means or another, People are now on some kind of social media network throughout the day. Sharing content across social media frequently accessed by your target audience (for example, LinkedIn for professionals with higher education) will reinforce your reputation as a ‘thought leader,’ generating more traffic to your site. LinkedIn, by the way, is the #1 social networking site for professionals with over 250 million users. Both Twitter and LinkedIn are favorites of B2B marketers. To simplify the process of social media posting, consider using a scheduling tool like Oktopost to help you schedule posts for greatest impact.

There are other rapidly evolving social media trends affecting how business is now conducted globally. We will discuss them in a future blog post.