You would have to live in a cave not to have heard of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and YouTube – the big players on the social media scene. But, with online marketing developing at such a fast pace, there are other up-and-coming social media platforms that you need to know about.
For many businesses they are already efficient ways of reaching new clients, and several of them are becoming so popular they are practically mainstream already.
Here’s the lowdown on five of the best – how they work and, more importantly, how they can work for your business.
Platform: Whisper
Number of users: 3.2 billion monthly page views
Demographic: 17 -28 years olds, 70% women
How does it work?
Deepest, darkest secret?
One of the problems with the main social media platforms is that everything you say can be tied directly back to you. You post under your own name, so there are limits to what most people will say publicly.
On Whisper, users post their secrets anonymously, and read the secrets of others. Heavy moderation of the platform ensures that the content remains respectful.
You can discover “Whispers” from all around the world, filtering by topic, location or popularity and respond to other people’s “Whispers” by commenting, adding pictures or sharing further secrets. You can also use the private message function to contact other users.
Of course, there is no guarantee that everything said on the platform is true, or nice.
How can you make it work for your business?
Opportunity for brands?
If you work for a big brand, you need to be aware that users might be talking about you on Whisper, monitor discussions and respond if appropriate.
More proactively, you could generate interest in a particular product or service by sharing “secrets” about it.
You can also encourage interaction by running a competition that encourages users to respond with secrets – for example, asking what they secretly love about your brand, or what secret they have associated with your product. The winner can claim their reward by sending their details via private message.
Platform: Ning
Number of users: Over 2 million communities
Demographic: Unavailable
How does it work?
Remember all those times you cursed Facebook for changing its layout or reducing your reach, and thought how much better you could run a social network yourself? Well, you can.
Ning allows users to create their own customised social network, including a personal page, forum, groups, events page, media page, video and photo gallery, blogs and membership profiles. You also have the option to keep certain areas public or private.
Ning provides you with templates so that you can customise your website to reflect the style and functionality that you want. Whilst the service does cost, there are 3 price plans to choose from (basic/performance/ultimate), depending on how many members your platform will have and the level of technical support necessary.
Ning
How can you make it work for your business?
You can use Ning just as you would any other social network, except that it’s under your control.
Create a central hub for your business, where customers, potential customers and stakeholders can give you suggestions and feedback, and you can share updates and other content. Or create a community around a certain topic that is likely to be of interest to your customers – for example, if you are a bakery, create a network for cookie lovers, or if you run a networking group, create a community for women executives.
Ning has a great collection of customer stories to show you how others have used it.
Platform: Snapchat
Snapchat
Number of users: With 60 million installs, Snapchat has about 30 million active monthly users
Demographic: Most popular amongst 13-23 year olds
How does it work?
Snapchat for business
Do you think carefully about what photos and status updates you post to Facebook, because you know that the evidence will linger online for years? That’s what Snapchat is for.
Snapchat lets users send a photo, short video or text (known as “snaps”) that disappear off the recipient’s phone, iPad or Tablet 1-10 seconds after they’re viewed. The information is also deleted off the server.
A new feature, Snapchat Stories, allows users to create a 5-second video, or sequence of images and text, to form a living narrative or “story”. You can invite users to view your “story” for 24 hours, before it disappears forever.
The key to Snapchat is that everything is temporary, solving privacy problems. On the other hand, it has been used for bullying and for sexting.
How can you make it work for your business?
Because of its emphasis on the short-term, Snapchat is particularly suited to time-sensitive offers. Companies have used Snapchat to announce give-aways and discounts, to offer exclusive previews of new products and to distribute reward coupons to customers who interact with them. BusinessWeek, for example, sends previews of its covers on Snapchat.
Snapchat Stories has been innovatively used by several brands, including McDonald’s, which this February announced a new bacon clubhouse sandwich via the platform.
Platform: Medium.com
Number of users: Unavailable
Demographic: Unavailable
How does it work?
Medium.com is Twitter’s founders’ next venture – an increasingly popular blogging platform that aims to “re-imagine” publishing.
Users publish stories, articles and even pictures, which are organised into “collections”. Your collections can consist of your own stories but include other people’s as well (very similar to a Pinterest board). You can follow other people’s collections, search for stories by topic and generate a reading list of interesting posts you want to get back to in the future.
To help users find interesting material, Medium publishes lists of trending articles, editors’ recommendations and the top stories of the month.
The comments system is dynamic, giving readers the opportunity to make remarks on each paragraph, rather than just at the end of the post. You can easily keep track of how many people have viewed your work and readers have the option of “recommending” it to others.
Your posts are tied to your Twitter handle so your existing followers can easily keep up with your work. You can share your posts with invited users before making them public, making joint-editing super easy if you work in a team.
How can you make it work for your business?
Medium collections
Medium.com is a very elegant platform that is exceptionally easy to use, and will display your content beautifully. It’s another outlet for your material, another great way to find an audience and to keep on top of the latest thinking around your subject area. It’s also a great place to find good quality material to share elsewhere.
We recommend it particularly for businesses that have published books – it’s a great way to run excerpts.
But one word of warning. At the end of the day, it’s not your own blog, built on your own territory on your own website. Think carefully before you blog there exclusively (just as you would before using LinkedIn’s blogging platform exclusively). Ultimately, your readers need to be driven back to your own website!
Platform: We Heart It
Number of users: 20 million monthly users (with a growth rate of more than a million/month)
Demographic: 80% of users are in the under 24’s range
How does it work?
We Heart It
Meet Pinterest’s more stylish little sister! We Heart It is a beautifully designed platform for people who love sharing pictures, but with a younger, cooler look and feel.
Each user creates a “canvas” for all their content. This profile page can be customised and should reflect your style at a glance – We Heart It is all about expressing your personality through your interests.
Uploaded pictures can be organised into “collections”, or themed albums. You can search everyone’s images and explore by topic via a tagging system.
“Hearting” is the equivalent of Facebook “liking” and if you “heart” the picture of another user it appears on your canvas, giving you the opportunity to follow the user and keep track of their posts.
How can you make it work for your business?
We Heart It is an ideal platform for small to mid-size businesses wanting to target the teen and early twenty-something market. By creating your own “canvas” you can express your brand’s personality, create useful content for your target audience and drive traffic back to your website. (Just like Pinterest, if users click on an image they are lead back to the site where it was originally posted, so you can link to all your blog posts.)
Advertising is tastefully integrated into this aesthetically driven platform and there is even a Partnership Programme option that offers the “ability to increase traffic to the partner sites by sponsored images”.
Do you have experience with any of these platforms? What do you think of them? And what are your favourite up-and-coming social media platforms? Please let us know in the comments!
