The way that marketers are approaching promotion of their products is changing. The nature of peoples’ online time has changed too, and as a result marketers are looking to social media sites to get their message across in different ways.
Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are just a few of the social media sites that lend themselves well to use by marketers to get their products under the noses of internet users. Optimising content for each of these sites can make the difference between a runaway hit and a complete waste of time.
Twitter, for folks who haven’t used it, is a micro-blogging site that focuses on short messages of 140 characters or less. It has become an art form in its own right, and regular tweeters pride themselves on carefully crafting short and punchy messages they can share with their followers to get across views that are to the point.
One of the main ways in which Twitter is used by its many devotees is to share interesting content with followers in the form of links to other sites posted in the form of a tweet.
Funny photographs, interesting articles and entertaining videos can spread like wildfire on the site as users pick them up from others and share them onwards to their own followers. Signing up for a service such as Twitpic, which integrates seamlessly with Twitter to show images as part of tweets, gives marketers the opportunity to share content that users can pick up, enjoy and share to increase awareness of a product or brand.
Facebook has become a ubiquitous part of most people’s online experience and as such presents marketers with a valuable opportunity. For many, Facebook is the front page of the internet and the first place they look when they log in, meaning that marketers have an ideal opportunity to get exposure provided they can get the right kind of content to be shared.
Users of Facebook often engage in discussions and debates in comment threads on each other’s posts and status updates. This can be a great opportunity for marketers to get conversations going and find out what their users think of their company and their products. Making videos and pictures on websites with quick links to post to Facebook allows people to share what they see on their profiles and gives the opportunity to track links and shares.
Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest is not the most social of social networks. Rather than inviting discussion, Pinterest instead focuses on the visual and gives users the chance to find things they like the look of and collect them all in one place.
The biggest opportunity with Pinterest is in having pictures of a product shared with a link back to the company’s website. Pinterest have also included a feature where quoting a price in the description will add a price tag to the photograph to make it easy for users to see what they could be getting and how much it would cost.
In order to get the most out of Pinterest, the most important thing marketers need to do is to ensure a plentiful supply of attractive, high-quality photographs of products. Sharing these on Pinterest and tagging them with common or popular search terms will increase the chances of users
Conclusion
The use of social media as a means for communicating marketing messages is growing. In order to take advantage of the desire of individuals to share interesting and worthwhile content with their peers, marketers need to ensure that they’re making their marketing messages engaging and compatible with the various social media outlets to get the best out of the social networking opportunities available.
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