Whilst establishing myself in the digital world as a Web Designer/Digital Marketeer, I feel that it is important to assess and evaluate some of the different social media platforms available as marketing tools to enhance my digital footprint.

Blogging to enhance my digital footprint

As of August 2013, it is estimated that over 18.9% of the world’s top 10 million websites are WordPress based – not bad considering WordPress was initially intended purely as a blogging platform.  Like the 1,890,000 WordPress websites mentioned above, I too required a website with an in-built blogging facility – this combined with the compelling popularity statistics made having to choose a blogging platform very simple!

Photograph by mkhmarketing is licensed under Creative Commons.

Next up: Facebook

Although I have been using Facebook since 2006, up until now I have been using this purely on a personal level.  I set up a Facebook Page for my Web Design business: Bazinga Media to expand my digital footprint.  There are so many benefits of having a professional Facebook business Page over a personal profile that perhaps it deserves it’s own post, but I will try to summarise some of the key benefits below:-

• Facebook Insights – understand your customer “fan” base and gain insights into what they like, their location and when they are online, amongst others
• Facebook Offers – ability to promote products/services
• Advertising – personal profiles can not be promoted
• Personal profile 5,000 “friend” limitation – “likes” are not limited in business Pages
• Integration with third party tools and applications

Photograph by mkhmarketing is licensed under Creative Commons.

Twitter

To further enhance my digital footprint it is important that I initiate and contribute to discussions on relevant topics.  To me, Twitter is the perfect tool for the job and I intend making more use of it going forward. Here is a link to my Twitter profile, and I can be targeted by using the @astoncarter handle.

Image by Diego Cornejo is licensed under Creative Commons.

LinkedIn

Finally to market my services on more of a business-to-business level, I have set up a LinkedIn company profile.  This is an ideal platform for networking and key to enhancing my digital footprint.

I have no doubt that there are other social media tools out there that I am yet to discover.  Thoughts anyone?