These are not just image sharing platforms anymore, but have grown up to be the champions of their industry and your money-making machine

Accenture published a report that asserted that social media is revenue ready. The top 50 retailers had earned US$1.8 billion of revenue from social media in 2015, and more retailers have embraced the fact by embedding ‘Buy Buttons’ on social media ever since. US$30 billion were made from social media sales in 2015, but the big irony is that people didn’t go on social media to shop.

In fact, you don’t need Accenture to tell you that people went to e-commerce site to shop. But what you probably don’t know is that 90 per cent don’t complete their purchase. In other words, people go to social media to connect with other people, but ended up buying for themselves. People go on e-commerce sites for themselves and end up not doing anything for themselves.

Irony aside, you should know that you must adopt a non-deliberate and social media first strategy to be effective. That is topic for another day. In this article, we will look at the two relatively unknown social media options for your business.

1. Instagram Business

Instagram is the prime social media platform for business. There are now 25 million businesses on Instagram and 80 per cent of Instagram accounts follow a business. You need to get this: 200 million users visit a business profile everyday and 50 per centof Instagram businesses don’t link to an outside account. In other words, 12.5 million businesses are standalone ‘native’ Instagram businesses.

Source: Medium

This year has been a big year for Instagram Business where there was a big jump in the number of registered business. There are various strategies to get noticed on Instagram which can range from putting up your pictures at the right time, having more faces which leads to 38 per cent more likes and so on, and using their Analytics (instead of your own preference) to find out which photos work.

2. Buyable Pins on Pinterest

Pinterest is a social media site with a twist. The twist is that it started out as an action board where people keep the pictures of the tasks which they wanted to do and make the necessary purchase. Pinterest started in 2010 as a closed door, invitation only platform. According to Statista, Pinterest has the distinction of being the fastest site in history to hit 10 million unique monthly visitors.

Today, there are 200 million monthly active Pinterest users and only 66.6 million of it are in the United States. Pinterest is the second most used social media site for holiday shopping ideas right after Facebook and in front of the Instagram. Pinterest acts as a to-do list for shoppers and people who has a goal in life.

Also read: 10 ways to create an engaging social media presence

For instance, they could be single and ready to attract a relationship. They came across an image of a couple on a motorbike in Bali on The Heart Whispers and they would pin it for future reference on their browser because it strikes a chord with them. They can also do so for a table which they are looking for or the phone which they intend to replace.

Source: Guardian

Pinners (Pinterest users) are most open to marketing and two thirds of them follow brands. 83% of them prefer to follow brands over celebrities because they are intentional with their pins. 87% of pinners purchase because what they discovered on Pinterest and 93% of pinners use Pinterest to plan a future purchase.

Grown social media sites

Other popular and known social media sites for business include Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, LinkedIn and SnapChat. They started their corporate life for various purpose but as they grew a following of users, they started to have commercial value for businesses. Different social media platforms attract different type of users and even within the users there are different personas.

A straightforward contrast would be that Facebook is for causal networking while LinkedIn is for business networking. Of course, these lines can blur over time like how WeChat started as a social phenomenon for chatting but 90 per cent of sole proprietors ended up using them for work related purpose such as making transaction and coordinating tasks.

If you are a business owner, I know that I don’t have to tell you about the popular social media sites but Instagram and Pinterest are worth looking into. They are not just image sharing platforms anymore. They have grown up to be the champions of their industry and your money-making machine.

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