By Sam Fisher

From a business perspective there are 5 key social media platforms that should be utilised to help your online marketing efforts succeed:

Facebook: is the number one social platform in the world with over with over 1,000,000,000 active users according to its website. To put this in perspective if Facebook was a country it would have the third largest population in the world just behind China and India, that’s almost three times the population of the USA.

Google+: was supposed to be launched in rivalry to Facebook but failed to push the social networking giant out of the market. However what Google+ dose have going for it is integration into Google, the world’s biggest search engine which can mean higher search results when successfully linked to your business. Google+ is a great tool to link your bloggers to, as it can help your in house writing create author rank.

Twitter: is a great medium for posting your company’s news, as well as getting people talking about your brand. One re-tweet by an influential user can suddenly get your business going viral.

LinkedIn: is a social platform aimed at bringing professionals and business together. Because of this LinkedIn is a great way to network with other likeminded professionals, potential supplier and potential customers.

YouTube: is the social network for sharing video. With around four billion hours watched each month many companies use it as a free platform to share their video based marketing and updates.

What is multimedia and how do you use it for advertising

Multimedia to put it simply is anything on the internet that is not plain text. This includes but is not limited to:

• Photos
• Images
• Infographics
• Video
• Animation
• Apps
• Widgets
• Games
• Interactive movies

All the features listed above can be used to various degrees when trying to advertise and sell to your customers online in order to provide a more interesting and engaging user experience. There are many ways to use multimedia in a business and its most common use is in online advertising campaigns with the hope of them going viral.

How dose social media and multimedia fit together

In this new modern era of social media integration into online business it is no surprise that you can use social media to help boost your online advertising and help your multimedia elements such as Videos, Infographic and games go viral.

When you publish some great content on your website or blog you will want to spread the word to as many people as possible. Before the social media revolution this was a hard task that involved physical costly advertising and people having to email your website URL around.

Now however in the modern climate of the internet you can simply ‘share’ your multimedia and web page via Facebook, mention it on twitter or publish it on sites such as LinkedIn to greatly increase the impact and visibility of your online marketing. Not only that but these social platforms open up the possibility of your visitors sharing your marketing efforts even further, simply put one share from the right person can get your media seen my millions of people. No one can guarantee an online marketing campaign going viral but when sharing it effectively through all your social channels gives it the best chance.

About the Author
This was a guest post by Sam Fisher, a multimedia marketing Specialist writing on behalf of VistaPrint UK a supplier of online marketing material including build your own website templates.

Picture courtesy Kathleen Donovan