I think we all are familiar about the increasing impact of social media on our life, especially online life.

Social media sites like Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. has revolutionized our life badly. If you are the owner of a website or blog, or do run any online business, then you will have huge loss if you neglect this budding media. After all social media plays huge role in decision making.

In this blog post of mine I am going to discuss about how to choose the right social media platform for your business or blog. To be frank I decided to write this blog post, as I was inspired by some recent blog posts of my wife at her blog www.smtricks.com

Frankly, social media is considered as the best place to generate quality and targeted traffic to your business or blog. Thus, it is really hard to ignore your presence over there.

But with so many options available in our hand, it really becomes tough to decide which one is good for us and thus here comes this blog of mine as a handy tool.

How to Choose the Right Social Media Platform

How will you decide about choosing the right and best social media platform for your business or blogs? What will be the criteria to differentiate them?

Well, there might be so many things to consider before choosing the best social media platform; here are a few of those: which social media platform has how many active users, do they fit or suitable for my business model, do they belongs to my target audience? Similarly there might be some other questions as well which might help us to identify the best platform for our need.

Let’s discuss all of them one by one.

Twitter

Let’s begin the discussion with my own favorite social media platform, Twitter. Twitter in itself is having one of the unique types of social media sites. It works on the concept of the microblogging.

One of the things which always amaze me is its speed. For some people the same quality might became the main drawbacks as well.

One of the best benefits associated with this social media platform is its simplicity. It is among one of the simplest platform to connect with many people, even with unknown people as well.

As far as I have analyzed the popularity of this platform; I can say that it has become popular just because you just need the account of a person and you might address them. You might even contact a person who admires you, or you are a big fan of. On the other hand this social media platform provides you the ability to interact with your followers in a real quick time as well.

Although the biggest drawback associated with Twitter is that it is too hard to get noticed by the followers, reason being the huge number of flow of tweets. Though it has lots of other benefits as well:

Easy to Find New Leads

If you use twitter, you will realize the easiness to find relevant accounts or people, whom you might convert into leads, reason being the quick and easy search method over there. You can easily connect with anyone over there, and the best part is that if you are following the genuine people, they will definitely follow you back as well.

Forget about big celebrities who have millions of followers over there, and who don’t give a damn about their followers, genuine people always follow this etiquette of follow back. Thus you can easily connect with them.

As far as search is concerned, they were the first one who utilized this concept of hashtags, and it is one of the best tools to get relevant people for your niche. Just want to spread your own business, let’s go ahead with a unique hashtags and see how the popularity of your business increases.

If you really want to utilize twitter for its full capability, do use the search features over there, search for some people who are facing some kind of issues related to your business niche, and try to resolve their issues, or provide help or solutions to their issues if you can, and see how the popularity of your business increases rapidly.

Get Connected with Mass

Hashtags being the best options available with Twitter through which you can also get connected with the mass. The best way to utilize hashtags to its fullest is to check for them for your local area and prepare your own content with the same hashtags, thus you will get higher visibility.

Competitor Analysis

There was a time when it was too difficult to analyze what your competitors are doing, but with the invention of twitter, you can easily identify what activities your competitors are performing. Although it has some negative impact as well, as your competitor also has the rights to check what you are doing and they might also counter it easily with their own strategy.

It is possible only because the normal concept on which twitter is working is the openness of them. Anyone will be able to see your tweets, unless you restrict them with privacy settings. But then if you stop anyone to see your tweets, it will actually be against the charm of twitter for which people are active over there. Thus it will more harm you than doing any benefit to you.

Local Connection

Twitter provides another opportunity of being local to your business. Although twitter itself is a village and you can connect with anyone over there, but then you can precisely select your local area as well to connect with local people only.

So if your business is more local prone, twitter is the best social media platform for you to connect locally.

SEO Benefits

Though I am not getting inside deeply for the SEO benefits of twitter, but let me tell you one of the best SEO benefits which twitter provides. If you want Google to cache any new page of your site, simply share a tweet with the link and see how soon Google crawler reaches to your new page.

Being an SEO, I can clearly say that Google gives value to the tweets for any website.

Google+

Many people will consider Facebook as the second best social media platform, but if you go by my own experience I will list Google+ as the second best social media platform, though it might differ with your niche, but in fact for any online business which want to get the SEO benefits, Google+ is one of the best social media platforms.

You might ask me why I am not putting Google+ as the number one contender, the reason being its hardness to connect with people over here unlike twitter. Although Google+ provides all other benefits of a social media sites like sharing information with your followers, finding your own audience base, connecting with them, etc.

Here are some other benefits which Google+ provides to its users:

SEO Benefits

Despite having too much chaos that Google won’t give SEO benefits to sites which are active on there, I strongly believe that Google+ is that platform which provides the maximum SEO benefits. In the post Penguin and Panda era, businesses are left behind to use social media sites to get SEO benefits, and since Google+ is their own product, Google simply gives preference to the sites which perform well over there.

So if you really want to gain some SEO benefits for your website, I would suggest you to participate in Google+.

Utilizing Google Authorship & Publishers Tag

Well, one of the revolutionary things during last few years in search engines is the Google Authorship, which helps search results with the picture of the author of that blog, thus differentiating them with other common search results. It has played a vital role in increasing the click through ratio for those sites.

So, if you are having a blog or running a business blog, I would suggest you all to apply for the Google authorship and claim that you are the author of that particular blog. Similarly if you are having a Google+ page for your business, don’t forget to go with the publisher tag.

I will write another blog post on these two terms very soon.

Google Communities

Another benefit associated with Google+ is the huge list of communities which provide us to interact with likeminded people. Also Google+ provides huge set of tools like hangout, etc. to connect with your followers, allowing it to be a great social media sites.

Facebook

For many people Facebook might be the number one preference as far as choosing a perfect social media platform is concerned, but for me it comes at number three.

Although FB has the largest number of users available, and the best thing which comes in favor of them is that these users spends a lot of time over there. The users of FB are too loyal to them, thus making it a hot property to invest on.

The reason why I am a bit disappointed with them as a social media platform is that slowly-slowly it has converted into a cheap place, and with the crowd of poor contents, your quality content might also be disappeared soon. No doubt that FB is a fun place, but don’t expect that you will get huge traffic from there. It’s a common tendency that people will click on like button over there, but they won’t give a damn to visit your website from there.

One of the best ways to capture the attention over there is with the help of images. Images are given higher preferences over normal content in FB.  If you want to remain intact with your brand value, and then believe me it’s not the perfect place for you. You can get success over here only if you share some light and fun content over here.

FB is not meant as a place where you can claim yourself as an expert of a particular field; the best place to do so is obviously LinkedIn.

What I think about FB as a social media platform is that you need a real creative and regular approach to increase your fan base over here. I guess FB is more keen towards increasing their own revenue, so if you really want to get success over there then you must need to pay them.

YouTube

YouTube is not the cup of tea for everyone, but seriously a place which can return huge values to your business, if invested wisely.

As you all know that it is a place for streaming videos, and videos is not that easier to get created. Also I have seen this tendency of businesses in which they want to get quick results with the help of some creepy videos.

Believe me if you really want to get real returns from YouTube then you must need to invest wisely on videos. Creative content and approach is required to develop a high return video.

One of the best benefits associated with YouTube is that it is the products of Google itself, giving its higher value than any other social media sites.

Pinterest

If I do like any social media site even better than twitter then it is obviously Pinterest, but the reason why I am not that much active over here is that I am not that much good in designing a picture.

I don’t hesitate at all to accept the fact that I lack picture designing capabilities, one of the prime reason behind this is my color blind nature as well, and this is the reason why I don’t utilize Pinterest to its fullest.

Though it’s not true that Pinterest is only meant for those businesses only which are good into pictures, rather you can also share some content as well, with a simple design too.

The reason why I do love Pinterest is that it is a place where you can share your passion as well. On the other hand if you sell some products, it is one of the best places to share great quality pictures of them over here.

Other than these social media sites you might also be interested in sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. These sites are also quite good as far as getting returns is concerned. Especially with LinkedIn you can get quality leads as they have quite genuine user base. You might also utilize the groups over there, while with Instagram being a place of personal pictures; you might also make a place for your business over there.

So, it can be difficult to choose the best social media platform for your business or blog, but it’s not hard enough. Analyze the returns on a regular basis and identify which platform is returning best to you.

Please don’t hesitate in sharing your opinion about this blog of mine.