I often get asked, which is the best social media websites for businesses to use? The answer is, it depends on what type of business you have and how often you can interact with it.

For many businesses that deal direct with members of the public, Facebook a great social media website as you can build up followers and communicate with groups of people or individuals. You can contact them instantly and build up your brand via advertising your website and products / services. For other companies that have the time to interact on a daily basis and possibly even an hourly basis, Twitter is fantastic. This can work well for companies that want their clients to contact them in this way and if they want to be able to keep clients informed of current updates to issues being rectified or service updates that may affect them.

Ideally all businesses should use as many social media sites as possible as long as they do respond to people on there, otherwise it can have the opposite effect.

When most people think of social media marketing they think of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, however one place that’s often over looked is YouTube.

YouTube is the largest online video viewing website and has over 1 billion users who watch hundreds of thousands of hours of videos each day and with such a vast audience it would be absurd not to consider this advertising platform.

The key to advertising on this website is to tailor your advert to appear before similarly themed videos to gain the most interest from the viewer. For example if someone is watching a make-up tutorial there is no point flashing up advertising for the all new kitchen gadget available.

Tailored advertising is proven to be more effective than random hit adverts placed on popular videos as these are more quickly disregarded if they appear irrelevant to the subject of the video that is about to be viewed.

But with a bit of research a well-placed advert could end up earning you a vast amount of interest and business in return.

Social media is a huge part of our daily lives for many of us, often personally and also in terms of business. If you involved in the marketing side of any business you will most probably have looked in to social media marketing at some point.
Social media can be a great way to build up an online community of followers that can help grow a brand very quickly usually at little or no cost, but how do you start to get people to interact with your business on the social media platforms? Many businesses have taken the approach of running competitions on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This has often proved highly successful for many businesses and has seen their popularity increase tenfold overnight.
When using social media sites, the most important thing to remember is that people want to read interesting and useful posts and comments. They like to see a company that is active as long as the information they are posting is of use or offering them something, which is why competitions always tend to go down well.

Social media is now a phrase known all over the world is is often quite a large part of the marketing plan and budget for many businesses. So how did social media all start?

Back in the seventies and eighties not many of us had computers, they were very rare and usual only used for business use (and even that was seen as a luxury). It all started with BBS which means Bulletin Board System. This is basically a site that is created that allows users to communicate with each other across the internet sometimes sharing files and messages. Initially many of these sites use to offer pirated files that could be downloaded by a user for their own personal use. Because the internet used to be accessed predominately by dial up (using a phone line) people tended to use local groups to avoid long distance calling charges.

Once this type of community was built, people started to interact with each other thus giving us the first type of social media sites.