Image via Wikipedia

Social media is no longer a new subject. While there may still be some skeptics, social media has been embraced as an important business tool. There are dozens of platforms available and just as many reasons to utilize one or multiple platform.

Each platform is unique. Some are great in some areas but fall short in others, and vice-versa. Let’s take a look at the most popular social media and their strengths and weaknesses. Which platforms help customer communication, brand exposure, boost site traffic, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Facebook:

• Facebook is an excellent tool for customer communication. It creates a central, open hub that companies can use to drive their social interaction with customers. Companies can send their message and respond to the positive and negative feedback.
• By using sharing buttons, linked icons, and a company page makes it easy to expose your brand on other relevant sites.
• Facebook is a powerful tool for driving traffic to posts and messages. However, it doesn’t have the same effect with driving traffic to a company’s website.
• Adding Facebook to your arsenal has little effect on SEO with the major search engines. Although, if well done, it won’t hurt your SEO either.

Twitter:

• Twitter is, probably, the best tool for customer communication. Outbound messages can have an enormous reach and do so quickly. Inbound messages are brief and to-the-point, allowing easy monitoring and responding.
• As a metaphorical “Cocktail Party”, by interacting with customers and other Twitter users, the opportunity arises for others to spread exposure of your brand creating real impact.
• One issue with Twitter is that there is a ton of chatter, making it difficult to ensure you’re reaching your target to drive traffic to your site. However, it generates traffic from other sites (i.e. Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon).
• Twitter is not the ideal tool for improving your SEO. Although, the potential reach of your brand or message has a positive effect on your visibility.

Flickr:

• As an image and video hosting site, customers can comment on and share images or videos here. While Flickr creates a rather professional, organized hub for media, it’s only useful in certain areas at certain times.
• Combining its search ranking and integration with other social media platforms, Flickr is perfect for high-quality image posting.
• Unfortunately, Flickr is abysmal for boosting site traffic – end of story.
• While there may be some short-comings, Flickr is great for SEO. Everything is indexed in search engines and this platform is a major player in Google’s and Bing’s social search component.

LinkedIn:

• This platform isn’t optimal for communicating with customers. While you can create polls on industry-related issues, LinkedIn shouldn’t be your communication hub.
• LinkedIn flies under the radar but is a very useful, and powerful, tool to promote your brand. It highlights your professionalism and allows employees to create profiles, shedding light on the high quality of your team.
• Don’t count on boosting site traffic through this platform – period.
• Your LinkedIn profile will help with your SEO rankings, usually showing up on the first page of a search. However, it’s not where you want traffic.

YouTube:

• YouTube is an excellent channel to inform and entertain customers. It shows you’re tech-saavy and allows quick responses to customers.
• As long as you update your channel steadily, YouTube is an imperative tool for promoting your brand. Combine this with Facebook and you have a brutal one-two punch.
• New additions to YouTube’s toolbox, such as in-video messaging, are starting to improve driving traffic back to your site.
• Videos have an enormous impact on SEO rankings. Generating brand exposure through building links back to your site, which rank well on every search engine.

Digg:

• Any actual communication with customers is non-existant.
• The opportunity for mass exposure of your brand is available. If a story about, or from, you does well on Digg, it will definitely garner great exposure. However, there’s no guarantee.
• Digg is the most consistant viral-traffic generation site.
• Regardless of the popularity of your posts or stories, they will be indexed quickly and creates visibility among bloggers in your field.

Tumblr:

• Tumblr is a rapidly growing platform. Communication with customers is easy and effective. Tumblr is growing so rapidly that, if it continues to grow at this rate, it will rival Twitter.
• The platform is simple and makes content-sharing easy creating a viable branding tool.
• At the moment, what happens on Tumblr stays on Tumblr. There is virtually no traffic potential.
• Tumblr sites rank well and is compounded by the blogging style it uses to be a useful SEO tool.

Related articles

• Which Social Sites Are Best for Which Marketing Outcomes? [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)
• Social media tools for startups (globalthoughtz.com)
• Traffic Source Diversity is Essential for Successful SEO (seomoz.org)
• Social Media and your team (essexbrandadvertising.wordpress.com)

I’m always looking for the newest tools and widgets that make my life easier. I only have one arm so I depend on multi-tasking and speed. I put together a list of tools I’ve found to help.

Yoono – Useful Multi-task Tool – Yoono is an Internet plug-in that creates a sidebar on your browser (but you can decide if you want it visible or not). You can pick from 10 social networks that you update or follow the most. After putting in your settings, Yoono shows all updates on the social networks you chose to view and any RSS feeds you follow. Yoono is great because you don’t need all those tabs open and you can update several profiles at the same time.

ShareThis – ShareThis is a nifty widget. You can add it to your web browser toolbar, a blog, and it also appears as an option when you right-click. ShareThis allows you to send anything you find on the web (e.g. cool picture, good blog post, interesting article, etc.) almost anywhere (e.g. email, Twitter, Digg, etc.). It’s similar to the ReTweet button.

StumbleUpon – The web is enormous, so how can you cut your searches down to only what you want? With StumbleUpon, you give sites a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Based on your ratings, StumbleUpon suggests sites you might like or are similar to sites you rated. Another sweet feature is to Stumble. StumbleUpon sends you to a randomly selected site, which is typically pretty fun.

TweetLevel – This is a new tool from Edelman, that measures your importance on Twitter. TweetLevel grades your Twitter profile out of 100 points, based on influence, popularity, engagement, and trust.

• Influence – Are you interesting (to other people)
• Popularity – How many follow you
• Engagement – Are you socially active
• Trust – Does anyone believe what you say

The higher your score, the more important you are.

Social Mention – Want a free real-time analysis of you or your company’s web presence? Good, because that’s what Social Mention does. You can easily track and measure what people are saying on more than 100 social media platforms. Social Mention aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

These are just a few rosebuds I like. You may or may not have known about them but they help me. What are your favorite tools?