5 Must-Use Social Media Platforms

Many people in the realm of social media marketing have picked up on the popular social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, to market for their business. While these widely-popular social media sites have great benefits and can reach a vast audience, here is a Top 5 list of sites your business won’t want to miss out on.

LinkedIn

With over 60 million users, LinkedIn has become a popular social networking site for many in the business world. Despite its rather large membership, LinkedIn is still a social networking site that has flown under the radar for many professionals. The site centers around networking and building relationships with people in similar industries and professions.

LinkedIn provides a way for professionals to create a digital resume through their account. This is easy to update and maintain and gives you an easy way to share your expertise without attaching a resume. Users can also incorporate unique features and add-ons to their profile pages like reading lists, employer or client recommendations, even integration with your company blog for greater exposure.

As the necessity to brand yourself continues to grow to be just as important as branding your company, LinkedIn helps. Your professional profile on LinkedIn is search engine friendly, often appearing in search results higher than your company domain for the same keywords.  And every professional announcement you make through an application or status message keeps you (and your company/service/product) top of mind for your network.

Digg

Digg is a social bookmarking site that also works as a social news gathering of stories from around the web, as a peer-to-peer recommendation engine. Articles and blogs that a user “diggs” are bookmarked and shared immediately with others. Digg populates its frontpage with the most popular articles that people are choosing to bookmark and share for the chosen category and overall. If you or someone at your company always wants to be “in the know”, Digg is one way to do it.

Through the use of Digg, an expansive new stream of web traffic can be brought back to your site and introduce new users to your business. This works two ways. The first is promoting your own content through Digg. This helps online users who are already interested in your market find you and your information through another digital channel other than your website. Second, my participating in the Digg community, you (or whoever writes your company web content) gets smarter about what content is relevant to others within an industry or market.

Since more and more users are discovering how Digg can network with other individuals and use those connections to share content they find valuable, Digg continues to be extremely successful. So its important to not neglect this medium of web traffic because as more and more people continue to network and share information on Digg, this site’s influence will continue to increase in the social media world.

Foursquare

Though we have recently profiled this web app, it’s a dead horse worth beating. This social geotagging platform is already seeing huge popularity for retail and food industries, but the app’s true potential is only just recently started to be tapped. Foursquare has developed a “Foursquare for Businesses” section that lets businesses list themselves and offers advice of how to effectively market your business within the foursquare community.

Foursquare has continued to gain in popularity since its creation. And as SocialMediaExaminer.com adds when discussing foursquare participation, “A pretty accurate rule of thumb for any business is this: Whatever people find fun and engaging is where your business should be.”

If you are looking to make you business the forerunner of this technology and establish your business as tech savvy and an industry leader, you might want to jump on board quickly. According to TechCrunch.com, Facebook is looking into integrating this software channel with its already billion-or-so user database.

Del.icio.us

Much like Digg, Del.icio.us markets itself as a social bookmarking site. This site allows users to bookmark and tag articles and other forms of online media they can use as references in their own content or share with others that belong to their network. It is a great source for news storage of all the relevant resources that contribute to your own content. You can then use these lists for web content or for – our favorite – presentations.  No need to worry about keeping that typed list of links during a presentation – just set up a tag for that presentation and log in to your account before you start your presentation. Voila! you have everything you need wherever you go, without notes or flash drives.

By having this collective relevant data in one place, users can search your database to find content they value, and see your business as the experts in the process. Using del.icio.us effectively can benefit a company greatly because it allows for various forms of media to be easily shared with those that they are networked to, and build industry authority and loyalty from online users.

Flickr

Flickr is a social networking site that seeks to share visual content particularly in the form of photographs. Flickr can be use to increase buzz for your company and products that need promotion. Because its more informal than what your content should be on your website, it lends itself to a more “behind-the-scenes” look at your business.

Companies can use Flickr in countless ways: events and special occasions, around the office glimpses, sneak peaks of products in the works, and so much more. Participation on Flickr keeps communication clear and transparent with those interested in your company and also gives the company show growth, personality, and approachable.

In summary, these sites are often untapped by many companies but can have great benefits to a company if they are used effectively. Utilizing these various platforms of social media could benefit your company in unique and collaborative ways.