Eight most popular social media sites

1. Facebook

This is the biggest social networking site with the largest number of monthly users – 1,100,000,000. There are millions of small or medium sized businesses promoting themselves on Facebook and it is estimated that larger companies spend over $100 million on FB advertising per year.

2. YouTube

YouTube, owned by Google, is the global video-sharing website. With 1,000,000,000 monthly visitors, it is expected to generate $5.6 billion in gross revenue in 2016. Billions of hours of video are watched on YouTube each month and over 1 billion videos are watched on mobiles daily.

3. Twitter

Twitter is loved for spreading the word via ‘tweets’ – short messages. Approximately 81 percent of Twitter’s advertising revenue comes from mobile usage and a 24-Hour Promoted Trend on Twitter will cost you well over $200,000.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site that helps to build professional linkages and engagement with other users. It is the world’s largest professional network for this purpose and has over 225,000,000 monthly users. Each second it adds at least two new members, all of which attracts marketers.

5. Pinterest

This is a content-sharing service with over 250,000,000 visitors each month. It is estimated that 80 percent of its users are women, and millions of subscribers have connected their accounts to FB.

6. Google+

This site has 120,000,000 monthly users who interact socially. It’s used for relationship marketing – there is a 50%+ positive interaction between Google+ users and brands.

7. Tumblr

This microblogging platform is used for sharing photos, videos, audio, quotes, text or anything else marketable. It has 110,000,000 monthly visitors and currently hosts almost 300 million blogs.

8. Instagram

Another great platform for sharing visual stories. With 100,000,000 monthly visitors, and new marketing tools coming out soon, it is thought that Instagram will be increasingly used for business.

Tips & tricks

Start with your marketing strategy; social media is purely a means of communication.

Study the profiles of  your target customers and design your media messages accordingly.

Separate your personal life from your business world, both on-line and off-line.

The internet is addictive. Manage your time; assess each channel of communication and then prioritise.

Social media is great fun, just don’t neglect the other aspects of your business.