Posts Tagged ‘Flickr’

With all the social media sites out there, should you be using any of them besides Facebook and Twitter for marketing your small business?

This is an excellent question, and one that I think about fairly regularly.  Luckily, at some point last year I downloaded a fun data sheet, The CMO Guide to the Social Landscape, that was distributed by CMO.com.

The data sheet breaks down all the major social media sites, from Twitter to YouTube, to provide an overview of how each performs in four key categories: customer communication, brand exposure, click-through rates (CTS) and SEO.

Because Twitter and Facebook are discussed ad nauseum everywhere, I will skip those and focus on other social media sites.  (But in case you are wondering—big surprise—both Twitter and Facebook received high marks for customer engagement and branding.)

Flickr

In terms of customer engagement and branding, Flickr can really only help you put faces to names and “humanize” your company a bit.  Click-through rates are also very low; however, Flickr is great for SEO, which surprised me.  According to the guide, Flickr is

…heavily indexed in search engines, passing links and page ranks. Also helps images rank higher in Google Images and in building inbound links.

LinkedIn

When it comes to customer communication, LinkedIn can be used to answer industry-related questions, but not for much else.  Click-through rates are not that great, though the few people who do visit your site could be potential customers, and unless someone is searching for your company by name, it won’t really help with SEO either.  Instead, LinkedIn is great for personal and company branding and establishing your industry knowledge and expertise.

YouTube

YouTube is a great way to engage your customers with funny and/or informative videos, and if you really build and promote your YouTube channel, it is one of the most powerful branding tools available.  Because videos tend to rank high in search engines, it is great for SEO.  However, YouTube is not the best way to drive traffic to your website, since traffic is directed right to the videos.  If you want to drive click-through rates, add a hyperlink in the video description.

Digg

Because Digg is a social news sharing site, it is not the best way to communicate directly with customers.  However, it gets high marks in the other three categories.  There are lots of branding opportunities, especially to promote objective press and blog coverage of your company. If you post something that becomes popular, you will see a huge spike in website traffic and links from bloggers, both of which will help with SEO.  Even if your posts aren’t super popular, SEO will still be goosed, thanks to indexing.

StumbleUpon

Another social news community, which means the chances of reaching your customers are not that great.  You can buy targeted ads on StumbleUpon, which is good for brand exposure, but it can get expensive.  Instead, StumbleUpon excels at driving traffic to websites and SEO, because it

…enables a diverse range of people to discover your content and share links via the su.pr link shortener on Twitter.

If your story makes it to the top StumbleUpon page for its tag, SEO will be helped considerably, especially since the site’s large use baser makes it easy for people to find and link to your content.

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What other social media sites have you found helpful for marketing online?  Leave a comment below!

Image by Flickr user webtreats (Creative Commons)