As of the first quarter of this year, Facebook had 1.44 billion monthly active users—more people than live in China. So it makes sense that it is the site most organizations prioritize when developing a social media strategy.
It’s not a bad approach considering you’ll certainly find some portion of your target audience there. According to the Pew Research Center, the 74 percent of online adults using social media are divvied up like this, with 52 percent using two or more sites.
- 71% use Facebook
- 23% use Twitter
- 26% use Instagram
- 28% use Pinterest
- 28% use LinkedIn
Those five social channels are the major players and the ones we always consider. But depending on your product or service and target audience, there are a plenty of other social networks that can be excellent additions to your social strategy.
Content Sharing
You could argue that users share content on every social channel, but there are social sites are dedicated to certain types of content, like Slideshare and Medium.
Acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, Slideshare is the largest online community for sharing presentations and professional content, like, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars. With over 70 million professional users a month, Slideshare is an excellent way to position your organization as a thought leader.
Medium is an aesthetically-pleasing writing platform where anyone can write about anything, and they do. Readers can find and follow writers or publications (sets of curated stories), leave notes in the margins of articles, recommend, share, bookmark and respond.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking websites have been around for over a decade, an eternity in internet years, and the average click-through-rate is low (about .1%). However, most campaigns that go viral begin on the top social bookmarking sites.
On Reddit, one of the most popular and the self-proclaimed front page of the internet, users can submit content that is divided up into subreddits, vote on submissions and comments to increase or decrease their visibility and submit links and comments.
While social bookmarking can be an effective way to increase brand awareness or promote a campaign, there is an etiquette on these sites, and it’s important to take the time to understand each site’s folksonomy and become a legitimate member of the community before contributing.
Social Shopping Sites
In 2014, 150 million referrals to e-commerce stores came from social networks, like Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. But social shopping doesn’t end there; community-based, e-commerce sites are popping up daily, each one targeting a different audience with different types of products.
Among the multitude, Polyvore—just acquired by Yahoo—is a higher-end, fashion-focused community site for visual collection creation, product discovery, and purchasing. A more deal-driven site Fab.com offers different categories of products often available at steep discounts during flash sales. With many niches, social shopping is a channel to seriously consider if you have products to sell.
Social media is a platform where you can build brand equity and tell your story to your target audience. The place where you’ll find them and the content that will resonate the most all depends on their demographics and psychographics and your products or services.
Want to chat more about how to create a powerful social media strategy? Drop us a line. We’re happy to help!