SECONDARY SOCIAL MEDIA SITES – ARE THEY WORTH MY TIME?

Moving Beyond Facebook and LinkedIn in Your Social Media Campaigns

I’ve noticed that a substantial number of digital business owners often stop at Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn when forming a social media strategy. A lot of folks seem to feel once they’ve mastered those platforms, their social selling is pretty much done.

But brand-building can go so much further. A fancy website, great content and SEO can only do so much to generate the traffic your business needs. Reaching a large and relevant audience on multiple platforms is now more important than ever.

Brands are now exploring dozens of secondary social media sites, many which are worth your time and effort. There are four that deserve your special attention, if you haven’t gotten there yet: Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit and Quora.

The important questions – Are these secondary social media sites worth my time? Will they really do anything to help me sell more e-commerce products or raise brand awareness for my digital company?

Let’s crunch the numbers together.

PINTEREST: WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Pinterest became the second leading sources of worldwide social media referral traffic in the second half of 2017 by share of visits.

It is an often overlooked social media site that is wrongly acclaimed to be for only the home decor, crafts, recipes or fashion industries. But all sorts of the topic are now popular on Pinterest including technology, e-commerce, business, and education.

What does this mean for your e-commerce or digital company? The data shows that there are 175 million users on Pinterest with the U.S accounting for 60%.

Roughly 93% of active Pinterest users said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases while 87% said they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest.

The point is you are missing out if you haven’t taken advantage of Pinterest for your e-commerce or digital business, especially if you run a B2C business.

With a heavier emphasis on imagery versus text-based content, you can use Pinterest to increase traffic to your business.

If you already have a Pinterest account but can’t seem to be getting the needed result, here’s a great resource to help. New York Times blogger Neil Patel will likely help increase your Pinterest traffic in minutes.

https://neilpatel.com/blog/pinterest-traffic/

HOW CAN INSTAGRAM IMPROVE MY BUSINESS?

There’s a lot of traffic, and sales waiting for you on Instagram.

The photo-sharing platform may not be able to give its sibling Facebook a run for its money when it comes to referral traffic, it sure can match and surpass it on the e-commerce sales front.

Brands continue to record ecommerce success on Instagram.

For example, Nike recorded massive sales with Instagram when it launched PHOTOiD–an app that lets its customers or fans upload a photo of their favorite shoes, customize them, and then repost the pic across social media, and buy their own design.

The Instagram campaign generated 100,000 shoes created in the first week and an 8,000 click-through rate to buy; all with zero media spend.

It is not hard to see why.

Instagram has 500 million daily active users and 25 million businesses registered on the platform. The U.S alone accounts for 77.6 million Instagram users.

Interestingly, 80% of Instagram users follow brands, giving brands a unique way to reach potential customers organically compared to a Facebook page.

Instagram is definitely worth your time no matter your industry or target audience, you just have to come up with creative ways to connect with users.

Here are a few ways you can drive more traffic from Instagram:

● Optimize your Instagram bio links
● Use a shortened URL in captions and comments
● If you run an e-commerce business, include prices on photos
● Use hashtags
● Mention your website in your Instagram stories
● Watermark your photos
● Use Instagram targeted ads service
● Give value to get more traffic

SHOULD MY BUSINESS BE ON REDDIT?

Yes, if content marketing is a critical part of your digital marketing strategy.

Why? Because Reddit is not only a major social media site but also a massive content aggregator.

With over 250 million users and over 1 million communities all of whom are highly engaged, you want to pay attention to the Reddit traffic machine.

Despite its bad press of being a den of ‘trolls’ or ruthless users, businesses have recorded success with Reddit simply because they understand that Reddit users or Redditors are suckers for super value content.

From general to specific, you can take advantage of the power of subreddits to get your brand noticed in the wide range of niche communities that are relevant to your brand.

Here are few tips to get more traffic from Reddit:

●  Post uniquely great content that is super relevant to your chosen subreddit. This will get you upvotes and increase your reputation score (karma).
●  Post infrequently to the same subreddit. A 14 to 30 days interval is great.
●  Be a redditor, not a marketer. The temptation to push out links on Reddit can be very high especially when you begin to see a spike in traffic. But you have to put the brakes on it because Reddit hates marketing.
●  When you do post a marketing content, make sure to address any complaints or opposition redditors may have about it in the post.
●  Let your first or second Reddit posts be non-promotional
● Comment and reply to every redditor who comments on your post
● Share your new Reddit posts on other social media platforms
● Keep your conversations authentic and humble.
● And yes, you can use paid Reddit ads.

IS QUORA ANY GOOD FOR GENERATING BUSINESS LEADS/TRAFFIC?

Using Quora for your business comes with two awesome benefits:

It helps you build your personal brand. It drives referral traffic.

And best of all, anyone can use Quora.

Quora is a social question and answer website with some similarities to Reddit. It boasts over a 100 million unique monthly visitors and is the 66th most visited site in the U.S and 122nd in the world, according to Alexa.

The way Quora works is pretty straightforward: people ask questions and several people provide answers.

Like Reddit, to make the most of Quora you want to join conversations around your niche. Consider it part of your content marketing channels to drive high valued traffic to your website.

To achieve that goal you’d need to have:

● Excellent content on your website/blog because that is the one reason Quora users would want to visit your website.

● Quality time to spend building a personal brand on Quora.

With those in place, you can go ahead to create a Quora account (if you don’t already have one) and start answering questions.

The referral traffic is in the quality of your answers and the relevant blog post on your website you link to in such a way that it doesn’t come off as marketing.

As much as possible you should try to answer questions extensively on Quora and not by asking users to read your blog for the answer.

The keys to success on these sites are to define your goals, then determine how to budget the dollars and time to make it a worthwhile expense. If done correctly, it can really pay off.

Content is originally published at https://www.ebizadvisers.com/secondary-social-media-sites-are-they-worth-my-time/