What is Social Media?

Social Media has been around for years, the older readers may remember MySpace as their main source of online interaction and the millennials or younger may never remember what a life without Social Media is like in the first place. It is the world's simplest time passer, a place where you can go without ever leaving your house, a hub of 'friends' who have never met face to face, and the most relevant marketing platform to date.

For the most part, Social Media includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Snapchat. However, there are many other widely used apps that allow for internet connection as well.

In today's world, marketers have learned how to really capitalize their skills and reach their audiences on these platforms and that is why we want to bring it to your attention today. In fact, Investopedia.com even says, "for businesses, social media is an indispensable tool. Companies use the platform to find and engage with customers, drive sales through advertising and promotion, gauge consumer trends, and offering customer service or support. Social media's role in helping businesses is significant. It facilitates communication with customers, enabling the melding of social interactions on e-commerce sites. Its ability to collect information helps focus marketing efforts and market research. It helps in promoting products and services, as it enables the distribution of targeted, timely, and exclusive sales and coupons to would-be customers. Further, social media can help in building customer relationships through loyalty programs linked to social media."

To put it more simply, content marketing is a way to promote your business or product online by giving it a unique persona that benefits consumers and social media is where you do it!

Though a lot of people are just on social media to interact with old friends and family or follow influencers we believe that understanding these platforms from a business point of view will really give you a new perspective and a better understanding of where the world is at and where it is going.

Allow us to outline some of the best social media platforms for your business to use:

Facebook - Facebook is the number one social media platform with over 2.3 billion active users world wide. Though many people would like to brush of Facebook as an irrelevant platform, to do so could significantly hurt your business because even if it isn't your favorite platform it is where billions of people go every day to catch up. You need to be there! Facebook's demographics consist of Women ages 25-34, However, they aren't too far ahead of the 66% of men who are on Facebook nor the 50% of 18-24 year-olds who logon as soon as they open their eyes in the morning (Zephoria.com). Facebook is booming, don't miss it.

Instagram - Instagram is a platform used for the artist and creatives on the world today. Full of photos and a limited character count for captions keep things short and sweet, however having an aesthetically pleasing feed is more difficult than just posting a nice photo every once in a while. Now that smartphone are really making advances people are able to capture some of the highest quality photos by putting in minimal effort so having good photos is critical. Instagram users are also all about creating a 'vibe' by editing their photos in a similar way to make their pages cohesive so knowing how to do that will only increase quality traffic. Hubspot.com says that 72% of teenagers are on Instagram, so if your target audience is younger then you can't pass this platform up.

Twitter - Twitter tends to be the more harsh, sarcastic platform when it comes to overall tone. This is where people go to put out short and usually humorous posts about life experiences and retweets allow for hundreds of people to see post from people they don't even follow. Though twitter is not greatly used for advertising purposes, it is a great platform to interact with consumers on. People can easily tag companies on twitter with their complaints and praises, so responding as a business become essential to the brand image. This is also a great platform for businesses to show their 'unprofessional' side by joining in on the latest trends and posting memes to further engage.

LinkedIn - LinkedIn is for the business minded professionals out there. It is a platform where you learn and share about industries as a whole, rather than just promoting yourself. This is also the largest platform for job networking, so if you are in search of employees this is definitely a good place for you to post about it. Another best practice for LinkedIn is to engage with other companies here, by talking about, sharing and promoting other business you build your own credibility and are likely to get the favor returned.

The truth is, every platform of social media is different in users, content and purpose so before creating a business account on each one we suggest really thinking through who you are as a company and how you can best you that site. But, if you're still not exactly sure how to use them then be sure to stay tuned into the content croc. In the following weeks we'll be explaining the differences and similarities in both social media and content marketing as well as giving examples, best practices and relevant trends than are going to help your company soar above the rest.