Online Presence As A Gateway To Other Businesses Or Career

Many people who have established an online presence would soon find out that maintaining an online presence can be rewarding and also irritating. This is because by establishing an online presence you expose yourself to the world which means you can reach and be reached by millions if not billions of people.

I do no claim to know all the social media platforms there is, I certainly don’t know the dominant social media platforms of China, Russia or Japan for example. These countries have their own social media platforms that dominate their respective countries.

Firstly, since these countries are not English speaking countries and whose people can be very nationalistic, knowing these social media platforms in-depth would be very hard for an English only speaking person just like me.

What this article would tackle would be in my opinion, the most important social media platforms in the western countries, but also for those who subscribe to western made social media platforms.

It is to be noted that there are many social media platforms who have come and go, but the following I have mentioned have stood the test of time and are even growing. This is why if you are marketing yourself or your products in any way, you should be present in at least one of these social media platforms.

When we say social media, what comes to mind for most of us is Facebook. Although younger people in many developed countries have ditched this social media platform in favor of younger and newer social media platforms, in many developing countries, Facebook is still dominant.

Facebook was first created to connect college students to link with one another. From college students, the linking of people grew to link to everyone. You can link with a total stranger from anywhere in the world if you wish and when you they accept your friend request.

Facebook has also expanded beyond linking people together. They have functionalities that are designed for business like Facebook Marketplace. You could also setup your business’ or organization’s online presence via facebook.

In fact, there are many people even people who can afford their own websites who use Facebook instead to create their online presence. This attests to the continuing strength of Facebook in the world of social media.

Many people who create online content, even social media content earn money through ads. Facebook doesn’t have this feature before but now it has. You can earn money thru your videos. Ads can show at your videos and you and Facebook would split the ad revenue.

But the real money in Facebook would be exposure. That is why businesses run professional Facebook accounts complete with paid social media experts to run their Facebook account. Facebook may be old, but it still has billions of registered accounts.

According to statista.com, Facebook has 2.85 billion monthly active users. This makes it the largest social media network around the world.This fact cannot be overlooked no matter what your perception of Facebook is.

Personal accounts may open some doors of opportunity, but usually if they do open, they would be worthwhile ones as personal accounts tend to link people who generally have positive relationships with each other.

On the other hand, a business or organization account is more businesslike. From my experience after visiting a few business and organization accounts in facebook, I noticed that the online contents were mostly social in nature.

That is why if you are a professional businessman or employee, it is better to use LinkedIn for establishing professional connections instead of Facebook as LinkedIn excels much more in this purpose.

There is no doubt that if you wanted to build a following to yourself, one of the best social media platforms would be Twitter. Due to Twitter’s relatively unstructured format, you can use it as often as you want.

All you have to do is tweet or write a short message as much as you can per day. Well, not exactly unlimited. You are allowed by twitter 2,400 tweets per day. This runs to about 2 tweets per minute.

This is a huge number since most people take a few minutes just to tweet one time. Basically, Tweeter allows you to tweet throughout the day on an almost non-stop basis. And the good news is that you can do this for free.

You can also make money with Twitter now using the ad revenue model. But again, there are more people using Twitter as their advertising platform. They promote their own products such as their courses or websites in order to generate money from tweeting.

It is like Tweeter is your own advertising agency. In fact, the Kardashian sisters make millions of dollars advertising other people’s products on their Twitter account. Many other celebrities are also paid good money to endorse other people like politician and other celebrities.

As such, Twitter is a good social media platform for people who want to be endorsers using their online celebrity status. This is also the reason why there are many people who spend good money just to be famous in Twitter and other social media platforms.

If Twitter is to text then Instagram is to pictures. That is why if you want to be seen and not read much, you should definitely consider Instagram. This is why Instagram is filled with beautiful people and beautiful things.

If you are one of the lucky few who look good in pictures or who have beautiful products to sell, you would have a high chance of making money using Instagram. Again, there are many Instagram influencers who make good money being social media influencers in Instagram.

For example, there are Instagram influencers who are paid good money to wear clothes by clothing companies. These people may not be bonafide celebrities but in their own smaller way they are celebrities unto themselves.

Rather than earning money by the ad revenue split model where the content creator and the social media platform share ad revenues, these influencers are active ad agencies unto themselves and use their Instagram account as their marketing company.

Similar to Instagram, Pinterest account holders also rely a great deal on beautiful images to promote themselves and/or their products. One thing to note when using Instagram and Pinterest is that the competition for quality images is high.

This means that unless you are able to produce beautiful images, chances are you won’t get noticed because almost all your competitors in Instagram and Pinterest create and post very beautiful images to these social media platforms.

One thing that sets Pinterest apart from Instagram is this: women prevalently use Pinterest. If you do your own online research about Pinterest. There are many articles about Pinterest that will tell you that Pinterest users are mostly women.

These articles will tell you that if you are marketing to women customers whether you are marketing yourself or your products, the best place to market them for women would be Pinterest.

If you have a business or if you are employed in an organization, LinkedIn is a worthwhile social media platform to connect with other people at varying levels of an organization. LinkedIn is in fact, a major tool for many recruiters and companies to find new employees.

If you are the kind of person who is more interested in getting employed, getting a higher paying job, or a promotion rather than just merely socializing online with people, then you should seriously consider LinkedIn.

In fact, Linked has also built many functionalities that allow professional workers and businessmen to further socialize. One can argue that most of the people in LinkedIn are people whose sole intention is to find a customer or to get a job or a better paying job.

But aren’t these the purpose of establishing business connections? Make no mistake that LinkedIn is indeed a social media site for business. If you are interested more in the other benefits of online socializing, you should consider the other social media platforms instead.

YouTube is the second most widely used social media platform in terms of information search. The first one being Google, the search engine itself that has become the default search engine for many users.

I feel I don’t need to remind you what YouTube is. But in case you don’t know, it is a video sharing platform. People upload videos of all kinds from documentaries, music videos, podcasts and so on.

Just like the other social media platforms, you earn revenue through the ad sharing revenue split model. But besides this, YouTubers have used their videos to sell all kinds of digital and physical products.

The digital products can range from digital movies, digital music, digital courses, seminars, images, data, statistics reports and so on. Physical products can be merchandise or whatever these YouTubers are selling like tourism, cars and any product you can think of.

Although there are YouTubers who primarily earn from their videos, and most via the way of ad monetization, there are others who only use YouTube as an advertising medium. For some, it is a mixed bag. They use YouTube to earn via ads and also as an advertising medium.

If Instagram and Pinterest can be difficult for you to do because you need to constantly generate beautiful images, then YouTube is an altogether different thing. Making videos is very hard. You have to consider the hard work of making video and audio digital content.

This is the reason why you have to consider the competition you have whenever you upload your video content on YouTube. Every minute, 500 hours of video content are uploaded in YouTube.

This is how much competition you have. If Instagram and Pinterest requires you to have good quality image creation and editing software and hardware, then YouTube requires even more. You also need to have good quality audio creation and editing software and hardware.

When I’m talking about Google, I’m talking about your own website. Although this gives you the greatest control in terms of creating your own digital content, competition for website eyeballs is very tough.

There are just so many websites generating such high quality content that are so unique that it is very hard to even think of a website content that would not only be highly ranked by Google but read as well by website viewers.

The greatest benefit however of having your own website is control. You can monetize your website the way you like it without the hindrance of having to obey the rules of a social media platform.

Although there are many social media platforms and ways to advertise yourself online, unless you have a lot of money and resources, you cannot efficiently join all of them. Concentrating on one will mean sacrificing the others.

A person who contacted you via one of your social media accounts might become angered when you do not reply to them on time or even maintain links with them. This one person can be an influential person and may use his social media influence to harm your reputation.

This is why you have to pick your battles in terms of social media presence. You cannot possibly be good at all of them. Even maintaining one of them could be an almost impossible task as well.

This advise is not only my own personal advise, but also the advise of other online social media experts. Also, online presence may contribute also to only a small part of your business success.

There are businesses who have managed to thrive without a strong social media presence. The first thing you need to consider is whether your followers no matter how many are they are actually paying customers of your products.

You may realize the hard truth that although you may have several thousands or even millions of friend links in Facebook of which you actively spend a lot of time socializing everyday, none of them would buy even one of your products.

Creating an online presence gives you not only the opportunity to make money through the most common online monetization method which is the ad revenue split. It also gives you the chance to promote your own digital and physical products which may be more profitable.

You must however pick your battles. Not all social media platforms are ideal for you and your products. It may even be not advisable to use a lot of your time and resources in cultivating a strong online presence as not every online follower is an actual paying customer.

Social Media Income