New Social Networks Your Business Needs to Adopt NOW

As Facebook seems to be upsetting more and more users, several of them are looking at other options for using social media.

The one thing that Facebook has been able to sustain so far though, is that everyone is there, making it difficult for some to leave.

Instead of just leaving Facebook though, many are adopting additional/new social networks and small businesses should follow suit and do the same.

Is Facebook Anti-Small Business?

Small businesses that like to take less risk, tend to jump on the bandwagon a bit late in the game, especially if they aren’t too technically aware.

While many businesses have been on Facebook for years, several are just coming in, and many are finding it not as welcoming as Facebook once was to businesses who adopted it when it was more business friendly.

Traffic has dropped, new likes are difficult for many to get without spending money on advertising, and when you do get fans, you don’t reach as many of them with your messages. Facebook may or may not be making changes to fix this, but the question remains: Is it too late?

2 years ago Facebook was THE place to be on social media, and businesses were clamoring to get on there to get a share of that huge market. It was much easier to connect with fans, run contests, and grow a fanbase with little effort.

Businesses were able to reach out to potential fans more easily, where as today they can barely reach their own fans. It was a great place to be.

Today, return on time and money investment is much lower for companies, and this seems to be the price late adopters pay for being late to the party.

Growth on New Social Networks

On the other hand, there are several new social networks that companies can use instead of Facebook, and they seem to be just as profitable, if not more so.

Google Plus

One such network is Google Plus, while some nay-sayers write about it not being as successful as Facebook and Twitter, hundreds of millions are using it, and like it.

From our own clients, we have seen traffic from Google Plus convert at much higher rates than Facebook or Twitter.

It is much easier to grow on G+, and there are many opportunities for companies to provide content to their fans without worrying about paying for a fanbase they can not reach.

The SEO benefits alone are worth venturing into this network, and atmosphere is much more welcoming.

Pinterest

While at just a fraction of the users of Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has a very active community, and it is driving droves of traffic to all sorts of companies, especially retail business.

The numbers for return on Pinterest are higher than Facebook as well, for our clients, and again, growth is much easier.

Women, who control the majority of shopping money, are prevalent on Pinterest, and spend hours of time looking at pins, repinning, commenting and visiting websites.

While it isn’t full of games and apps, it is a place to visually save all of their favorite things, leaving the user feeling great every time they use it. If a company can feed this, they can easily get a following and profit from this new social network.

Which New Social Networks to Join

The downfall of having all of these new social networks is that many will not stick around. There are new and smaller social networks popping up every day.

But it is relatively easy to see which are going to be around long enough to make a profit, especially when they start reaching the mainstream news.

It is at that point that businesses should consider jumping on board, not years later as the market is dying down, like Facebook is, and Myspace did.

What To Do Now

The future of Facebook is questionable for businesses. The terrain isn’t as welcoming and people are scrambling to make it work, because “They have 1 billion users”.

But, is it worth it, and while we see that it is for many of our clients it is, we also notice that other new social networks are much more productive, and for small business, that makes a huge difference.

We plan to be posting some business plans for using Google Plus and Pinterest soon, are their any questions you have that we can address in these posts? Please ask below.

If you need something sooner, email us or fill out our form for a social media analysis.

© 2013 – 2014, Social Media Consultant. All rights reserved.

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2 Comments

  1. Spot on! Facebook definitely has made it hard for businesses when they decided “Oh we need a monetization metho”. Okay, let’s charge fan reach and etc. They’ll be going down the drain if they don’t do something quick.

    Thanks for sharing in Bizsugar!

    • Not a problem, I hope they do something quick myself because they have such a large market, it’s a great place for business that way. But they are just worried about keeping investors happy with money, which I understand, I just don’t agree they are going about preparing their future very well.

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