The Beginner’s Guide To Choosing The Best Social Network For Visual Content

How can a social platform play a significant role in distributing your content? When introducing a new product or service; it is not as easy as it seems, especially that competition is rather stiff. Your content tells your future customers what your brand is really all about.

Now how can you let other people know what your business is all about? That’s where social media becomes your life saver.

There are probably about a hundred social networks; about a quarter of that has been useful to business owners and marketers, and you would only need a handful of these networks for your content.

Listed below are the social platforms you must use to distribute your visual content:

#1 Facebook

This is one social media network that under any circumstances your business could not go without. With over 1.4b users, Facebook is the greatest social platform success story whose humble beginnings is a far cry from what it has become today.

Who doesn’t know the history of Facebook? Of how this social networking site founded by Mark Zuckerberg and a few of his fellow Harvard University schoolmates in 2004 changed the way people connect and stay connected with other people from the rest of the world?

With so many subscribers and users, it cannot be argued that visual content posted here will be syndicated fast. Most people prefer to stay connected with family and friends using Facebook compared to other social media sites.

Facebook is the ideal platform for content distribution simply because:

• It allows you to set up a Facebook page for your business that makes it easy for you to be discovered and get connected.
• It helps you identify your niche audience
• Allows you to promote your post, business or website via Facebook ads
• Helps you measure and adjust metrics that work or did not work for your business

#2 Twitter

Twitter is another social media account your business must have. The first tweet  was sent by Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006, and ever since then, Twitter hasn’t looked back and has continuously been a favorite of celebrities and sports athletes in giving real-time updates to the public.

Twitter is a microblogging tool that helps you present your brand by sharing tweets about it 280 characters or less at a time. Twitter has become even more relevant with its renewed partnership with every marketer’s friend or foe (depending on your website’s rank)- Google. With that partnership, Twitter will provide content to Google so that the latter need not crawl all over Twitter. In exchange, tweets with content and URLs will have a speedy Google indexing.

Aside from that, Twitter is a very effective listen and learn tool. As most of the updates and interactions here are real-time engagements, you may check out the competition or what people are talking about your business by monitoring mentions and conversations. Though its 330M monthly active users are a far cry from Facebook, so many influencers are active on Twitter. 69% of Twitter users have purchased products because of something they saw on the network.

#3 LinkedIn

This is the social platform specifically designed for the entrepreneurial industry. This is the go-to place for people to establish and maintain networks in their chosen niche. LinkedIn currently has 500M active users with over one billion endorsements.

While Twitter has that limit when it comes to tweets, LinkedIn, on the other hand, encourages long posts in their Pulse network. Plus with its acquisition of Slideshare, LinkedIn has become the expert in B2B content marketing platform.

#4 Pinterest

Pinterest is the social networking site where you can pin images to your visual boards. This is THE social networking site where you can post pictures of your products and services.

You can use Pinterest as your company board. This is the kind of visual content that uses words as little as possible. Pinterest can be compared to your old photo album.

Tracking or monitoring is very easy with Pinterest because of its Analytics. You can keep track of your pin’s popularity.
In September 2015, Pinterest had 100 M monthly active users, 85% of it are females and it a $11B value. As of September 2017, the number of monthly active Pinterest users almost doubled since 2015, reaching the 200 M mark.

One interesting thing to note about Pinterest is that a staggering 93% of its users have done their shopping online in the last six months. Unlike in other social media networks where only your followers and friends can view your posts (unless you have set your profile to public), the number of people who saw your pins and boards will outnumber your actual followers in Pinterest.

#5 Instagram

Instagram is the mobile social networking, photo and video sharing platform that allows users to post pictures and 15-second video excerpts. It has over 800 M members and a staggering 95 M videos and images get shared on a daily basis.

Whereas Pinterest is composed of pins (of images) and boards (categories), Instagram is another image based networking site that allows your followers to like your photos and videos.

#6 Google+

Do you know that Google+ has just been launched in 2011? Plus is just another layer added to the different products and services that Google has already made available to the public like Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Hangout, and YouTube.

Google+ also has over 400 M active users. 13% of the businesses belonging to the SOHO (small and home) use Google+. 17% B2B marketers use this to launch new products while 64% of the marketers distribute their content here.

#7 Stumble Upon

Stumble Upon is like a social platform where you can find different interesting stuff that you can thumbs up or down. Based on their description, “StumbleUpon is the best way to discover great websites, videos, photos, blogs and more.”

According to Nick Robinson, co-author of StumbleUpon for Dummies, it’s a bookmarking, content and search engine site that gives your online content exposure. You just need to click on the Stumble button so content about your interests will be laid out to you. The content you have posted will work exactly the same way wherein people will stumble upon your content if it matches their interests.

#8 SlideShare

Fact- SlideShare has over 80 M users, 17% of its B2B marketers use it to launch their new product while 41% distribute their content here. Slide Share could be compared to a PowerPoint Presentation, but it’s so much more than that.

If you happen to be the artsy, creative type, then you could curate portions of your content and make a series of slides that are visually more stimulating than the usual article. Slide Share helps you get higher rankings with the use of tags.

#9 YouTube

Who doesn’t know what YouTube is? YouTube is that video sharing site where you can find an abundance of Dubsmash videos and a whole lot more. YouTube has over a billion user and has an estimated revenue last year of $4 B.

Approximately 300 hours of videos are uploaded every minute while there’s an average of 4 B views per day.

If you are intent on sharing several videos to your readers, then it is advisable to create your own channel. YouTube is perhaps the busiest website on the planet right now.

#10 Reddit

Reddit is an entertainment social networking site that allows its registered users to submit content. It was established in 2005 by University of Virginia roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. In March 2018 about 1.69B users had accessed the site.

Reddit is almost always on the front page of the internet that is why popular websites like Buzzfeed and most internet memes were also born here. If you have fun and satirical content that boggles the mind, then Reddit is the perfect place for it.

#11 Tumblr

Tumblr is not just a microblogging tool. It is also a social networking site that houses over 148 B posts and 345 M registered accounts. It was founded by David Karp in February of 2007.

What makes Tumblr appealing is it is a combination of a lot of things:

• it has the clean blogging functionality similar to WordPress,
• allows you to find new content with hashtags like Twitter,
• it encourages sharing its post like Facebook via its Reblog pin or button,
• and popular with images like Instagram and Pinterest

Wrapping it Up

Your various social media accounts are the most inexpensive way for you to distribute visual content. You don’t need to have access to many social networks. You only need a handful social media sites.

Facebook caters to a broader audience. You may repost your visual content to your own Facebook profile, your business page or to FB Groups you belong to. You can do Facebook ads targeting a specific audience. Twitter is great for curating your long articles to 280 characters or less. You can create slides of your list posts in Slide Share and so many more.

For every visual content you have, there’s the appropriate social network (or more) for it. What’s important here is you do not forget that every content you make has a particular audience that’s why keywords, meta tags, and hashtags are very critical for your content to get noticed. Content works when you know how to use these tags strategically and at the right time.