There is strong evidence that social media marketing is expected to dominate online marketing this year. The Nielsen-Community Engine 2010 Social Media Business Benchmarking Study found that 70% of all Australian businesses intend to engage in some sort of social media activity this year. This has been attributed to the significant growth of many social networking sites during the past year. Unfortunately many businesses are yet to buy in mainly due to its novel and unproven nature. Choosing the right platform to conduct your online marketing can be very difficult. Your options range from Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Bebo, to LinkedIn. Which will prove to be the best performer in terms of generating leads, sales, brand awareness, ROI, traffic, and SEO?
This article will look into the 3 arguably most used social media networks by the Australian population, namely Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and explain in brief the advantages and disadvantages attributed to each platform.
Facebook
Facebook is currently the most popular social networking site in Australia, with approx. 8 million Australian users. It's main appeal is how easily a page can be created.
Facebook is great for engaging people who like your brand / products and want to share their opinion with the rest of the community. Facebook Ads is also a good way to generate brand awareness and quick, highly targeted promotions.
From a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) perspective, it adds little to no value unless blogs pick up and feature your posts. Convincing users to click through to your website can also be difficult, so do not expect to drive a massive amount of traffic to your site.
Twitter
Twitter’s API allows the opportunity for web developers to integrate their web site with Twitter, which in turn provides an easy way of increasing brand awareness through viral marketing.
Twitter’s downfall, particularly in Australia, is the fact that it hasn’t been embraced by many average users. Typical Twitter users have been identified as younger, more tech savvy individuals, so unless this is your target demographic a different platform might be more suitable for you. Another issue with Twitter is how easy it could be to irritate your followers by over-tweeting. Twitter can help your site’s SEO and could potentially entice clicks as tweets often rank high in search results.
YouTube
It is by far the most widely used video based social media site, and represents an excellent channel to quickly engage customers and demonstrate your social-media savvy. It’s relatively easy to construct your own channel and utilise it as a promotional tool, including the ability to allow public users to embed your videos on other websites with ease. Video results also rank highly, hence is very good for link building purposes.
There is not much negativity with YouTube apart from possible high video production cost.
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