• Business Marketing
• Social Media

Social Landscape for Business in 2012

Written by Simon Geraghty.

CMO.com has produced its annual guide to the Social Media Landscape for Business. It is a great one stop reference guide to print and keep; well worth pinning on the office wall. They have ranked each Social Media platform from good to bad (using green, amber, red colour coding) across the following four key headings:

1. Customer Communication
2. Brand Exposure
3. Traffic to your site
4. SEO

DotDash towers has pulled out some of the highlights for the most popular, and recently most talked about, Social Media channels. The the full detailed infographic is pasted below.

1. Customer Communication

• Facebook: Scores highly for engagement, sharing and participation.
• Twitter: When combined with tools such as Social Mention and Hootsuite will help track mentions and sentiment about your brand.
• LinkedIn: Offers more limited engagement opportunities, however LinkedIn Group offer a way to do this.
• You Tube: Is a great channel for quickly engaging your customers and managing your PR.
• Google Plus: Has some great features for communication, if only the average time spent there by users was longer than 3 minutes per month.

2. Brand Exposure:

• Facebook:  You can either hire a consultant to organically build your followers or use Facebook’s own ad platform for quicker results.
• Twitter: Is very strong for branding and PR opportunities. It also allows unique opportunities to engage and spread news virally.
• LinkedIn: Is really effective for personal branding as well as for your company with brand pages (this really comes into play under the SEO heading).
• YouTube: Is an excellent branding tool when your channel is populated with quality videos.
• Pinterest: Users follow you and share your pins with their followers. Contests have started catching on, encouraging visitors to pin their favourite things.

3. Traffic to your site

• Twitter: Has great potential, but businesses who over-promote themselves can turn off followers, who quickly become un-followers. Find a solid balance between good content and self promotion to drive traffic.
• Facebook:  Is an excellent way to share content from your site and traffic to your site from Facebook is on the rise thanks to share buttons (so if you don’t have any sharing buttons on your site get them right away!).
• LinkedIn:  Will not drive significant traffic to your site. However, the traffic generated is usually from relevant readers.
• YouTube: Traffic primarily goes to the videos. You can add an external link in the description to drive traffic to your site.
• Pinterest:  Can generate immense amounts of traffic to your site. Copyright issues on the platform is still generating much debate. Adding “Pin It” buttons to your pages is key in getting people to share it with their friends and followers.
• Google Plus: The more +1s to your content, the more likely you will reach the top of the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs) due to Google’s pesky meddling  ….  I mean,  Google’s favouring pages and sharing.

4. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

• Facebook: Liking or sharing has yet to show a long-term effect on search results. It can help to give insight on user intent, which can benefit your SEO efforts.
• Twitter: While tweets are good for breaking news, the links provide little to no value and do not how up in Google search results.
• LinkedIn: Most LinkedIn pages will rank in search engines’ top 10 results.
• Google Plus: Receiving +1s on pages has shown significant SERP increase. An excellent tool for brand management and content promotion for SEO.

Infographic developed by 97th Floor.