What is the first thing that strikes your mind when you hear the term, “Social Media?” For most of us, it is Facebook. This social media platform attracts more than 1.3 billion people every day. However, the social networking channel like Facebook is quite popular. Here, we are going to discuss the popular types of social media sites. Let us see what they are and how can marketers and business owners use them to reach their target audience.
Types of Social Media Sites
Social networking sites
Most of us are familiar with popular social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. These social media sites help us to connect with family, brands, and friends. They promote knowledge-sharing and is all about human-to-human interaction. A social networking site is the best of all in the social media sites list. In these sites, users can share their ideas, curate content, upload videos, and photos, form several groups based on interests, and take part in lively discussions. They are built around the user and everything that is significant to them and their social circle.
So, have you ever thought about how social networking sites can help your business?
Reach your target audience through ads- These social networks cultivate huge, diverse communities. Advertisers can rent permission to communicate with people based on certain targeting metrics. For example, an advertiser who wants to reach a young crowd must advertise on social media apps like Snapchat whereas those who want to reach a professional user must use LinkedIn more. As these are data-rich social networks, you can reach your target audience without spending too much money.
Network- Engage with followers, find like-minded consumers or potential business partners through groups and hashtags, and build many connections.
Research- Social media marketing platforms are a great place for doing customer research and using social listening tools to follow conversations around certain terms. This can assist you to understand your audience in a much better way.
Media sharing networks
Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram are some of the popular types of social media sites used for sharing photos, live video, and other types of media online.
How can media sharing networks help businesses?
As major social media sites, these sites are valuable for lead generation, brand awareness, audience engagement, and most of your other social media marketing objectives. Media sharing networks give people and brands a place to find and share media online, including video, live video, and photos. The lines between media sharing networks and social networks are obscuring these days as social relationship networks like Twitter and Facebook add live video, enhanced reality, and other multimedia services to their social media platforms. However, what differentiates media sharing networks is that the sharing of media is their main purpose. Similarly, on websites like Vimeo and YouTube, video is the main mode of communication.
When deciding whether your business should or should not establish a presence on media sharing networks, it is significant to think about your available resources. If there is one common thing in most of the popular social media platforms like Instagram or YouTube have in common, it is a completely planned mission and professionally designed media assets, generally following a certain theme.
While most of the posts on relationship networks include posts, texts on networks like Snapchat and Instagram start with a video or an image, to which audiences may decide to add content like mentions of other users, captions, or filters.
Image sharing sites
Visual content like infographics, images, and illustrations attract our imaginations, eyes, and many hearts. Social media platforms like Imagur, Snapchat, and Instagram are designed to magnify the power of image sharing. Users develop, curate, and share unique images that ignite conversation and speak for themselves. An image can be worth a thousand words for your brand. Advantages of a social media site are:
- It encourages user-generated content- Image sharing websites are considered as a unique gift for photogenic businesses. You can run campaigns helping users to share a pic with your product and a distinctive hashtag.
- It creates inspiration- By developing, curating, and sharing your own pictures, you can inspire and engage the users, connecting over a shared interest.
Video hosting websites
YouTube has changed the way we watch and create videos. It changed this medium to something accessible. Improvements in technology and connectivity assisted video to go the extra mile. Video hosting platforms like Vimeo and YouTube help creators to put together content and share it with a platform that is optimized for streaming. This accessibility makes video a significant medium.
Utilize video hosting sites for:
- Sharing phenomenal content- Yes. This is quite an obvious point, but creators can utilize YouTube to build communities and publish their content.
- Engagement- The comment section of YouTube provides plenty of opportunities to know the individuals watching your content.
Discussion Forums: Quora, Reddit, and Dig
This is one of the popular types of social media sites. Such kinds of social media channels are used for sharing, finding, and discussing various types of information, news, and opinions. They assist businesses by being a top resource for doing market research. These forums are one of the oldest methods of running social media marketing campaigns. Before the emergence of popular social media players like Facebook, these forums were the places where experts, enthusiasts, and professionals used to do various types of discussions concerning different fields.
- These discussion forums have many users and it ensures unparalleled reach for your business. These are the places that offer answers to various queries of any domain.
- In case your business requires customer reach, then these places would be the most perfect one for your business.
- Along with knowing answers and sharing information, these places have a great impact on advertising too.
Content curation and bookmarking networks
Some of the popular types of media sites used for bookmarking and curating content include Pinterest and Flipboard. People use these networks to find out, save, share, and discuss new and trending media and content. These social networks can be effective in driving customer engagement, website traffic, and brand awareness.
These networks are a source of inspiration and creativity for folks seeking ideas and information, and by adding them to your social media marketing plan, you will open new channels for establishing brand awareness and engaging with your customers and audience.
Bookmarking networks like interest help individuals find, save and share visual content. A simple step for getting started with Pinterest is to make your site bookmark friendly. This entails optimizing headlines and images on your website or blog for the feeds these networks utilize to access and share your content. You must also pay close attention to the images that are featured on your blog or site- these are the window displays, so they must represent your content in a proper manner.
Content curation and blogging platforms like Flipboard are like bookmarking networks, but with a focus on finding and sharing articles and other content. You can develop your own Flipboard magazine to sort through the most engaging content on your favorite topic from third-party sources, and to show your own content.
Many other networks are nowadays adding bookmarking and curation features. For instance, Instagram now provides features for users to save content and generate private collections.