Sales & marketing

Picking your poison: Pinterest or Instagram which social media channel is for you?

Social media can improve and enhance your brand’s online reputation in a drastic way if utilised efficiently. It can also be a confusing conceptfor businesses and success can be hard to measure in terms of ROI. When it comes to “getting it right” there are many ways harmonising a company’s social media accounts can reap rewards though.

Social media channels do have the perception that they are untrustworthy especially when it comes to ads on Facebook and Twitter. The “sponsored” text below the ad is sometimes an automatic turn off if the audience has not been targeted properly. However gaining customers? trust using social media can enhance your brand reputation.

One important rule of business is to follow your audience and appear where your audience is found, both online and offline.

Social media channels for businesses can include:

Facebook

• 30 million businesses now have a Facebook fan page
• 19 million businesses have optimised their fan page for mobile

Twitter

• 51 per cent of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products
• 42 per cent of users learn about new products through Twitter

Snapchat

• Snapchat has about 30m active monthly users. A further 55per centof users use Snapchat daily around 16.5m people
• Snapchat was the fastest growing digital platform in 2014, growing by 57per cent

LinkedIn

• One in three professionals on the planet are using LinkedIn
• LinkedIn is used in at least 200 different countries

Google+

• 70per centof brands have a presence on Google plus
• 41 per cent of business-to-consumer marketers and 39 per cent of business-to-business marketers use Google+ to source new business

Instagram

• Instagram has 100mmonthly users a large audience for your brand
• 57 per cent of the top brand marketers are averaging at least one post per week

Pinterest

• 49 per cent of users have purchased 5 or more products that they have “pinned”.
• 25 per cent of consumers have reported buying a product/service after finding it on Pinterest

Blogs

• More than 60 per cent of US online consumers claim to have made purchases as a result of reading a blogger’s recommendation
• 65 per cent of daily internet users read a blog

Mytop tentips:

(1) Tailor. Social media channels are all different and aimed at different audiences content suitable for Twitter may not necessarily engage your LinkedIn audience.

(2) Do be personal, give a personality to your brand and enhance communication. No one likes to see the same message posted to someone else, tailor it by using a name. Do not however treat it like you would a personal account, relevancy is key.

(3) Respond to both positive and negative posts. When communicated to effectively angry customers could be persuaded to return and with it being common knowledge that retaining is cheaper and easier than acquiring this is invaluable to a brand.

(4) Engage with audiences by running competitions, using third party tools such as Woobox. This can be a great way to increase likes and improve brand awareness.

(5) Learn from competitor’s successes and mistakes to constantly improve your own approach.