What does that mean in marketing terms? In a newspaper advert, you would decide how big an area you want to cover by how many papers you want to have it printed in, how big an ad you can afford, where it’s going to be placed within the newspaper, how often it will appear, and how many issues the ad will run for. With social media you only have to create the ‘advert’ once, post it to the site of your choice, and if you have done the job right it will be picked up the people who already follow you then they comment it and then their friends will see it and comment leading to friends of friends seeing it and so on. However it must be remembered that the ‘gossipy’ nature of social media relies on people doing the spreading, and unless your ad is interesting/amusing/thought provoking, it won’t spread out past your current followers. Older media at least already has that built in market of eye/ears where a good ad will grab their attention even if you weren’t directly targeting them.

The company has put a lot of work into supporting business Facebook accounts, allowing you to have vouchers and customer limited promotions, smart data feedback on who is following what and how well items impact, and bunch of other tools. As it’s the go to site for social media marketing, there are lot of tools and applications that can pull out more information for your business, at a price of course. The biggest problem I’ve found with Facebook is that has a habit of redesigning parts of its’ systems every few months so you have to keep eye on that what you set up isn’t now broken under the new version of the system. It also has some very strong rules on what advertising it allows. Those rules are always hard to find, can be confusing, and they can be quite quick in punishing offenders. They can also be quite slow in correcting when they are wrong, and seem to have a blind spot about the rules when it comes to big companies.

Like Facebook, Twitter has added a whole range of business tools for you to access. Analytics on who is following and retweeting the posts you make, driving people to your website, etc. For a small business Twitter works well if there’s a reliable stream of information on your feed. It is a fine balancing act of what you should post as a business that will keep people interested over what will turn people off, but it can be done. While it’s not going to be all in one solution that Facebook is, it’s a very useful tool to keep people up to date in what is happening with your business and to generate interest in what you will be doing in the future

If your business is classed as ‘white collar’ or business-to-business focused then Linkedin is the community you should be paying attention to. It’s not fire-and-forget like Facebook when it comes to getting your name out there. You will have to invest the time on a frequent basis to get the most out of it, but it will help you in ways that Facebook just doesn’t do.

For businesses they have a range of specialised ‘pins’ for rich media, which in other words for anything other than a static photo with some text. They also supply analytics for how your boards are being used and what are the most popular pins, by different consumer data. Naturally all of this costs, but if your business is very visually orientated, like a fashion store, this investment could pay back very quickly.

Because Google+ is designed to be an all in one solution, it’s quite powerful but a little fiddly to setup. It will work with any type of business and will let you do a wide range of things to promote yourself. I like it, but if you have a limited amount of time to invest in social media, then you are better spending on Facebook first. Once you have a handle on it, then invest in Google+

While both systems are not designed as social media from the outset, there is nothing stopping you from using either of them to get your name out there. All it takes is adding the right set of modules to get everything you want to give you a fully functional website with social media feeds. It does however require you to do a work setting up and keep up with routine maintenance of the systems to keep them up to date and secure. If you don’t have the time or the interest in that, then the previous four providers will be much more suited to your needs.

The usefulness for businesses with these three sites is a bit more limited as all three are more like galleries and social clubs than retail spaces. That being said if you business is more artistically focused, then you should be paying attention these sites as it’s a great way to promote your work to people and lead them to other sites where you can make the sales.

Doing video clips for social media is a bigger investment of time and resources than just posting photos or text, but it can be a very powerful way of getting a buzz about your business. Youtube takes the most work to look professional but you have the space to really go into detail of what you do. Six seconds doesn’t seem like a lot of time for a business, but you can see that Vine users can pack a lot of punch into that fraction of time, and viewers are far more forgiving of low production values as long as it’s interesting or funny. Instagram sits in the middle of the other two in time and quality standards. Personally I would recommend that you concentrate on getting your text and photos online first and once you are comfortable doing that then look at adding video content.