FACEBOOK: It’s been said that the average Facebook user spend 55 minutes per day on Facebook, that they have 130 friends, and they are a member of 13 groups. Worldwide active users are 400 million, 50% of active users login every day, and there are 60 million status updates per day. Does your website boast these stats? If not it’s a great idea to reach users where they are active – on Facebook. Facebook has great functionality for sharing news, creating events, and uploading photos and video amongst your fan base. Creating that fan-base can be a difficult task, so you need to add value by creating something useful/entertaining on the fan page, such as an application, game or competition. Post not only marketing information on your fan page, post websites that you think may be interesting to your fan-base. Facebook also offers promotion for your Facebook page with their own pay per click advertising (PPC) system. A Facebook presence for your company can have it’s downside though, and as with all social media, your fan page needs to be constantly monitored for negative feedback, and dealt with by contacting the customer, or by removing the offending post if necessary.

YouTube is a great way to showcase the video production arm of your business. By embedding YouTube videos on your site you’re also saving cash on bandwidth, (Thanks Google!) and at the same time promoting our videos on the largest video network in the world. A YouTube channel is also a great way of creating a presence on YouTube, as it allows a limited amount of branding and customisation of colours and page layout on your channel. Users can also subscribe to your channel and receive updates when new content is available.

TWITTER: Many people struggle to get their heads around Twitter, and for some of the older less-savvy folks Facebook is enough – but restricting yourself to only 140 characters? The obvious reason for marketing yourself on Twitter is again the user base, but also the ease of updates to your followers. Twitter updates can be linked to your website content management system and automatically post news/events to your profile via the Twitter API, Twitter also has a wealth of apps available for your mobile and MAC/PC. Hash tag your Twitter posts and users searching on that particular topic may easier come across your post and potentially follow your profile. Searching for your brand on Twitter can also turn-up some useful market research – direct from your customers.

ONLINE BLOGGING: Blogging with Wordpress, Blogger, or any other chosen platform has enormous benefit to the search engine visibility of your website. Wordpress in particular has great SEO built-in, and regular updates to a blog is what Google craves. Pick a topic you know something about, and try and include as many keywords related to your post as possible. (Without making it unreadable of course) Then tell Google about it via Sitemaps and by linking to your blog post via your homepage. Encourage sharing of your post with social networking buttons to promote to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Buzz and more.