Social Media Networks
Social media networks have become a major source of promotion channels for both small and big businesses that are keen on building their band value. Promoting through Social Media Networks can increase the visibility of your business to a larger extent. Since, these platforms are user-friendly and does not require high technical skills the promotional activity becomes much easier. Apart from the free promotions, you can also choose to have paid promotions to reach a target audience and increase and boost your posts to reach a larger group of people within a quick span of time. There are a lot of Social Media websites that are available in plenty; you may not have to have to build you presence on all these sites. However, you need to know which Social Media platform suits the best for your business and start building your credibility on such a platform. You should also understand the essence of Social Media websites and the most popular ones before starting to invest on any of these platforms.
Below are the 20 most popular Social media Websites that tops the list. This list would enable you to arrive at proper decisions prior to choosing the best ones to promote your business.
Take a sneak-peek of Popular Social Media Sites of 2017
Facebook 
This name has a magic in it and there are hardly a few people who does not have an account on this largest Social Media Networking website. This website has been famous right from the day of inception both in terms of users and recognition. Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 and within just 12 years it has become one of the popular Social Media channels with variety of features. Facebook has been successful in having 1.59 billion monthly active users or more and this shows the fame of this Facebook is one of the best platforms to accelerate your business growth due to its popularity and its capability to connect people from across the world. Gaining visibility on this platform becomes pretty quick as there a are a lot of chances of people connecting to your product or services personally and commercially. Facebook is leading social media website thickly crowded with billions of users. There are many fascinating facts about Facebook which help your business to grow quickly.
Twitte
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Disseminating information within 140 characters sounds little difficult but, the most famous Social Media Platform Twitter has been able to achieve this at ease. This platform has a lot of influencers whose one retweets can turn the games around. This is one of the best mediums to advertise your business. You need to understand and use the right kind of words along with proper hash tags and that’s when your tweets get retweeted. Twitter has more than 320 million active monthly users who are smart to use the 140 characters in a brilliant way to spread their thoughts to the world. This is one of the best mediums to advertise your business and interact with your prospect clients as the tweets never go unnoticed. Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006, and has its headquarters in San Francisco, California. While using twitter for business promotion, you can check impressions, user interactions by using Twitter activity button available.
LinkedIn
Known for its network of professionals, Linkedin is one of the Social Media Channels that can be used to promote your business. Linkedin was founded on December 14, 2002, and launched 0n May 5, 2003. Linkedin is undoubtedly one of the widely used networks to connect with professionals from your area of expertise around the world at ease. Linkedin is available in 24 languages and has over 400 million registered users. This is a great forum to exchange ideas and get in touch with people of similar industries or your prospect client and understand the business related information and statistics.
Google+
This is another amazing Social Media Platform that has a lot of scope to promote your business provided you spend some time on building appropriate collections and get in touch with the right group of people through Communities. Google + can attract a lot of users who would be interested about your products and services. Due to it SEO value Google+ makes it a must-use tool for any small business. Launched on December 15, 2011, Google+ has joined the big leagues of having 418 active million users.
YouTube
Known for its videos, YouTube is the largest and most popular video-based social media websites. YouTube was founded in the year February 14, 2005. Formerly this popular video website belonged to the three founders from PayPal; became a part of Google in the year 2006. With users of over 1 billion or more per month, YouTube is one of the most sought video websites and the second most popular search engine after Google.
Pinterest
Known for pins, Pinterest was launched in the year March 2010, in comparison with the giant Social Media platforms like Facebook or YouTube; Pinterest is a relatively newcomer in this forte. However, it has attracted a lot of women visitors for the pins that appear on their bulletins. Business content along with the necessary details can be pinned on the digital bulletins that appear on Pinterest. By 2015 Pinterest was successful in acquiring 100 million users. If your business revolves around anything that interests women, do not forget to use Pinterest as a medium to propagate about your business as half of its visitors are women.
Instagram
Owned by Facebook, Instagram is another popular visual social media platform like Pinterest. This site was launched on October 6, 2010 and ever since then, it has managed to win the hearts of more than 400 million active users. Known for its photo editing feature a lot of people post information related to travel, fashion, food, art and similar subjects. This is one of the platforms where you can speak about your business by using the proper tags. 95 percent of Instagram users are also part of Facebook which makes it an advantage for you to choose this platform.
Tumblr
Not as user-friendly as any of the other Social Media Channels, Tumblr can also be one of your choices to promote a word about your business. With the concept, similar to Twitter, Tumblr has close to 200 million blogs. The advantage of this Social media Platform is that, it accommodates various post formats that includes quotes, chats, videos and photos and audio posts. It does not restrict you from the kind of content you would like to post or share. Tumblr uses the concept which is similar to Twitter’s retweeting option known as reblogging.
Flickr
Famous for its database of classy images shot by well-known photographers, Flickr which is originally called as “Flicker,” is another online platform that allows you to host images and videos. Flickr was founded by Vancouver-based Ludicorp which is now part of Yahoo. Flickr allows you to maintain an account of copyright images that can be sold as well. If you are a good photographer and have some unique pictures with you, Flickr is one of the best platforms to spread a word about your business. There are more than a 112 million users and the presence of it is in more than 63 countries.
Reddit
Known with the popular slogan, “The front page to the internet”, Reddit is also a popular Social media website which has users with similar interest who can discuss and share the content on the web. Reddit allows the registered users to share content in the form of posts. Since, this is not a platform to scream your ideas out, Reddit brings in the concept of engaging your thoughts with the users and this makes it a unique platform to share the posts about your business. Reddit also encourages you to create a network which gives you accessibility to attract the right set of audience. This site was founded by friends who shared the same room in the University of Virginia. The site has managed to gain more than 35 million registered accounts along with a lot of monthly users. Read blog post on reddit marketing tips published with SoftLoom IT Solutions website.
Snapchat
Known as an image messaging application, Snapchat has gained lot of popularity among the millennial. This software was created by 3 students at Stanford University which was officially launched n September 2011. Snapchat has grown immensely with an average of 100 million daily active users. Snapchat can be used to grow your business by sharing appropriate business related images and videos that speak about your business. By doing this, you can always choose to partner with the influencers and this in turn can help you take your business to a next level.
WhatsApp
Known for its amazing messaging services, WhatsApp Messenger, called as the cross-platform messaging application, can be used on all the devices. You can always improve your business through WhatsApp. By creating relevant groups you can broadcast the information related to you business. To have a great customer experience or a 24 hour customer service for a better business, you can have an exclusive chat group. By sending the appropriate images and videos, WhatsApp can also be used for marketing and promotional activities. Since the application has the luxury to support image, audio and video files it becomes simpler to express your ideas. WhatsApp was launched in January 2010 which was taken over by Facebook in 2004 WhatsApp has more than 1 billion users using it as mode of communication for both personal and professional front.
Quora
Human curiosity has lead to a lot of inventions and creations. Likewise, Quora is such a creation. Quora, founded by the then employees of Facebook, it has managed to attract a lot of users in the recent past. The website also claims of having more than 90 million monthly users who are unique. It is amazing to know how a website that deals with questions and answers of various genres has managed to raise huge funds without going Public yet. To promote business on Quora, you need to first follow people with similar interests and start answering their queries. Build a group of fan followers and start seeking answers which can help you accelerate the growth of your business.
Vine
Vine, another product from Twitter is yet another fastest growing Social Media application that allows sharing of videos. Vine is a social media app with 40 million users. Vine allows users to share a video clip which is just 6 seconds with their fan followers. The time duration of just six seconds may be a real short one however; there has been a lot of success stories by a lot of businesses by incorporating this service by Vine.
Periscope
Announced as the best app of the year by Apple Inc., Periscope is one of the social media channels that were bought by Twitter in 2015 immediately after its launch in the year 2014. This is a video streaming website and to improve your business, make relevant videos about your business and share it with your followers to grow your business.
BizSugar
BizSugar is another well-known social media channel that can be used by people focusing on small businesses. A lot of people including managers can use BizSugar to promote their business. BizSugar was launched in 2007 by DBH Communications, Inc., who are known for their popular business publications and they have also won award for it. BizSugar was then taken over by Small Business Trends LLC. Users can use this channel to promote their business by sharing videos and other format content as well. The users of BizSugar are allowed to vote on the submissions shared by other members on the channel.
StumbleUpon
Based on the interests you choose, StumbleUpon shows appropriate content and later shows recommends the similar content for its users based on their interests. You can promote links on the site that are relevant for people to stumble. There are more than 25 million people uses StumbleUpon to gather a lot of information. You can also choose to use the paid channel to propagate your businesses through StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is an independent channel and is a start-up that is backed up by an investor.
Delicious
Delicious is another social media channel that has a facility to bookmark web services which can be used to discover, share and storing bookmarks. Delicious is the brain-child of Peter Gadjokov and Joshua Schachter which was taken over by Yahoo. Delicious seems to have bookmarked a millions of URLs and has successfully got more than 5.3 million users on its channel. Delicious has gone through a lot of acquisitions before it was finally acquired by Delicious.
Digg
Digg is known to promote a lot of news that has stories picked up with great care that specifically targets people who are tech savvy and internet lovers. The subjects can range anywhere between politics, science and also viral posts that gets promoted. Since, there is an option of sharing content on other social media platforms as well. Digg can be one of your Social Media channels to promote your business. Digg also has a fair share of monthly active users of 11 million users.
Viber
Similar to WhatsApp, Viber is also a messaging application for just the handheld devices like mobile phones. Viber was launched by Viber Media in the year 2010. You can use this app to create useful information about your business and use as a promotional channel to grow your business. As per the reports from April 2014, Viber was successful on having 600 million registered users and 230 monthly active users.
