Three Lesser-Known Social Media Sites for Digital Marketing Success
It’s usually a better idea to be a big fish in a little pond than a small fish in the ocean. That’s the idea behind using one or more of these three lesser-known social media sites for your digital marketing.
But don’t get me wrong, these sites have traffic that numbers in the millions of users. Most businesses concentrate their social media marketing efforts on the big five: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+. You may discover, however, that you can do very well on the three sites detailed here, especially if their audience corresponds do the demographics of your prospects and you learn what kind of content works best.
I should also add that one or more of these sites could prove to be your “secret weapon” if your competitors aren’t yet using them in their digital marketing campaigns.
SlideShare
For many digital marketers, creating content for SlideShare is relatively easy. Basically, it’s a site where the content looks like PowerPoint presentations. Therefore, if you have any PowerPoint presentations that you’ve been using for marketing, getting the published on Slideshare is the proverbial “piece of cake.”
Slideshare is now part of LinkedIn. That fact should give you a little hint about the kinds of users who will be consumers of your Slideshare presentations. It’s a great social media site for B2B digital marketing content.
You’ll discover that SlideShare is more or less like a YouTube for slide presentations. People can follow you essentially the same way they subscribe to YouTube channels. They can “like” any presentation of yours and share it via other social media channels.
Be warned: Only upload excellent presentations. Savvy users set the bar high here. If your presentation looks like it was done at the last minute to fulfill a high school assignment, don’t bother uploading it. Find a freelance graphic designer to polish it up for you…then upload it to SlideShare.
Tumblr
Tumblr started out as a blogging platform. But some people today describe it as the love child of a WordPress blog and Facebook. As a blog, it’s sort of a “micro blog” – although not as “micro” as Twitter. Many use it for posting and reposting (called reblogging in Tmblr) visuals and are able to develop a very active following. The great thing about these viral reposts is that they are all “dofollow” links to your original post, so you can quickly get backlinks to your original post…assuming people like it enough to repost it on their Tmblr blogs.
Tmblr is also built around the concept of hashtags, and that makes it easier for you to connect with the right audience for your business. While Facebook has also implemented hashtags, I don’t believe they are as integral the the Facebook DNA as they are on Tmblr.
Because Tmblr is, as I said above, technically a site for micro-blogging, memes, photos, drawings, quotes, and short text entries do best. By the way, there are a lot of great free templates available to get your Tmblr presence started.
Reddit is probably the trickiest social media platform to use for digital marketing of these three. But it also has the greatest potential. If you’re not familiar with it, create an account. Then do some serious exploring to get a feel for how it works.
The site is divided into thousands of subReddits. The focus is on virtually any and every topic of interest you can probably think of. So…there should be one or more subReddits that touch on your areas of interest.
Think of it as a news site. You can post links and you can make text posts. Posts are “voted up” and shared. The secret is to post very engaging information on the specific topics that interest the readers of subReddit. If your posts come across as spam or “salesy” you won’t have any success. In fact, your effort will probably backfire on you and give your business a virtual black eye.
It can be a tough crowd.
However, when the stars line up just right for you on Reddit, you can score major traffic to your website that translates into big sales.
Finally, one good thing all three of these lesser-used social medial platforms have in common is they can be used to repurpose existing content. You can tweak digital marketing content you have already created and use it on these sites. Sometimes you won’t even need to make any changes.