Social media has exploded in popularity in the last four years and has proven to be extremely effective for people to keep in touch online.
But more recently, it has shown to have tremendous marketing potential, helping people boost their websites rankings, advertise services and save resources.
This short article will go through the three biggest names in social media and how can than assist your marketing campaign.
Facebook Facebook is a website where users can stay in touch with friends, and see see their own friends and connect with them.
At the core of it, it works on the principle of "friends of friends".
In terms of marketing, this can be translated to "word of mouth marketing".
Businesses can set up pages on the site which include photos, information on the company, location and more.
It also offers features such as status updates, which you can update with news of services, new products and special offers.
The major benefit of this is that when people join the page, they receive these updates on their own profiles.
Facebook is completely free to join and therefore is a cost effective way of advertising to your customers, who are statistically easier to sell to.
It also helps your rankings as backlinking from your Facebook page to your website will increase traffic and your PageRank.
Twitter Again, twitter works in the same way as Facebook although it is far more simplified.
Twitter has essentially mini updates of about 160 characters, which can be followed by those that join a profile.
Like Facebook, these can be used to link to special offers and updates in services and any news in your blogs.
It provides numerous valuable backlinks to your site or blogs increasing it's online presence.
YouTube YouTube is the largest video sharing website in the world, with over 2 million new videos being uploaded every day.
Much of the YouTube community consists of video bloggers, animation, music, film, gaming and a whole host of other fields of media.
It has also been an extremely powerful SEO tool to some businesses, typically those that sell physical products or software.
Videos are much more user friendly as it gives people the chance to see a product or service in action, rather than just reading about it.
For this reason, people will often turn to videos to see how a product works.
Like the other two platforms, YouTube also allows profiles to be set up, the difference being that the media format is video rather than text or images.
Companies can set up their own profile pages, list their videos and categorise them relevantly on the site to ensure the right people view them.
Each video can also provide a backlink to the site which naturally boosts rankings in search results for your site.
Crucially, it's important to remember what content to upload.
Constantly advertising products and trying to sell is not a good idea.
Vary the content to news, free advice and any developments in your field of business.
People are far more likely to return to fresh content.