For small business owners social media can be a great way to build your online presence and a free tool that you can use for business promotion. With millions of people active on social media websites everyday you do not want to be missing out on the potential benefits from social media. There are still some businesses that are neglecting social, however more businesses and people are starting to use social networks all the time.

With the amount of social networks out there today it can often be difficult for you to decide which ones to use and which ones to avoid but generally there are some that standout more than others and you are going to get better results from. In this post i am going to go through in order my six favourite social networks for small business and small business owners.

Twitter

Just like the vast amount of people using social networks today i love Twitter and it is becoming increasingly more popular for business owners. Over recent years Twitter has rose where Facebook has not done so well in and this is business pages. A lot of small businesses are choosing to use Twitter because of the advantages that you can get over other social networks.

Firstly Twitter is great to drive traffic to your website as research has shown a lot more people are click on links on Twitter than on other social networks so you can easily drive mass amounts of traffic to your website all at once. Secondly on Twitter it is a lot easier to gain a following than on other social networks because users are a lot more willing to follow you in the hope that you will follow them back.

Facebook

The amount of members alone makes Facebook one of the most powerful marketing tools for businesses. The dedicated business pages gives Facebook an advantage over other social networks which do not have special pages dedicated to businesses. Even though not as easy as Twitter, you can still fairly easily gain a large following on Facebook and a lot of people that are going to click on your links.

Facebook has recently added a new feature that is going to be very useful to small business owners called “Promoted Posts” This allows you to pay a fee for your post to appear at the top of peoples news-feed so give you maximum exposure.

Google +

This new social network  may not have as much users as Facebook and Twitter but Google Plus is growing all the time and even though it may not have a lot of personal users it is where a lot of business professionals hang out. For this reason Google plus makes a great place for all small business owners to make connections online and find new contacts to work and do business with. Furthermore for local searches Google will often show a link to your Google plus page.

YouTube

Some people will try and tell me that YouTube is not a social network but with the amount of social features on YouTube these days it makes a great place to socialize and really promote your business. Videos can work as a good way to market a small business as you can provide users with a lot of information  for free on the internet.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social network specifically designed for business professionals to hang out and allows you to add a lot of additional information about you and your business that you cannot do on some of the other social networks out there. LinkedIn is well worth a checkout if you are looking for potential clients,employees or contacts in your business niche as you can find a lot of information about what businesses people are involved in. However for promoting content for your actually business then i personally do not use LinkedIn for this.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon may have passed its most popular days online but it is still good for specifically driving traffic to your business website. People seem to have mixed success with StumbleUpon. I personally managed to get 2000 visitors to one of my blogs in one day before from StumbleUpon when someone else shared one of my posts but i have not managed to drive little more than a few hundred visits myself from StumbleUpon.