Top 5 social media platforms you never knew about

Are you looking for business deals, investors or opportunities for growth?

Have you grown tired of LinkedIn?

Then it is time you learn of other business-focused social media networks.

Here is our list of top 5 social media networks that you can use to grow your business:

Viadeo – where professionals meet

Viadeo is an online business-based social networking site that helps business people, mostly Europeans, connect with one another. As of 2014, the site had 65 million members mainly business owners, entrepreneurs and managers. Its interface is available in 11 different languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Turkish.

By displaying how each member is connected to any other member, Viadeo visualizes the small-world phenomenon.

The platform offers personal profiles, groups, discussion forums, event coordination, and other common social community features. Basic membership is free, but many core functions, like searching for people with specific qualifications or messaging people to whom one is not already connected, can only be accessed by the premium members.

Xing – for a better working life

Xing is a European career-oriented social networking site for enabling a small-world network of professionals. The company claims that it is used by people from over 200 countries.

This professional social networking site offers features that are similar to LinkedIn’s features, with its main users based in Switzerland, Austria and Germany. However, it is unique in the sense that it enables closed group discussions between the members of a certain company or business.

Xing also offers the system for closed communities, called Enterprise groups with their own access paths and interface designs. The platform serves as the infrastructure for corporate groups, including IBM, McKinsey, Accenture and others.

Opportunity – Welcome to the land of opportunity

Opportunity is a business network that uses a matchmaking algorithm to connect you with other professionals who can provide employment, sales, networking and relationship opportunities.

Its members can discover sales leads and employment opportunities, post jobs and build relationships, both personal and professional. Here are a few statistics: 1 billion opportunities discovered, 85 million professionals referred and connected and members from 190+ countries worldwide.

Ryze – expand your influence with Ryze

Ryze helps people make connections and grow their networks.

You can network to grow your business, build your career and life, find a job and make sales. Or just keep in touch with friends.

Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members. They can also join special Networks related to their industry, interests or location. More than 1,000 organizations host Networks on Ryze to help their members interact with each other and grow their organizations.

PartnerUp – your partner in business!

Are you searching for people and resources for business opportunities?

If your are, PartnerUp is just the social networking site you need to be on.

From co-founders and business partners to executives and board members, anyone who joins is bound to get the most out of this one.

PartnerUp allows users to connect with top people in a niche within a particular geographical location and make custom searches pertaining to job specifications. Yet another interesting feature of PartnerUp is that it favours entrepreneurs who are looking for advice and gives its users the opportunity to advertise their products or services.

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How can behaviors be changed?

Marketers’ goal is to convince the consumer to choice his product or brand, to like it and become a fan of it, a loved brand. What can a marketer do when he needs to convince the consumer to change his behavior and change his favorite brand or change his daily routines? How can he reach his goal?

For once you can try doing it online. While all of us spend a great deal of time online,  the digital world has become a convenient gateway to the audience a marketer needs to reach. And because behavior change happens over a period of time, digital is an affordable way to stay in front of your targeted audience. “Behavior change marketing, also known as social marketing, involves adapting the principles of traditional marketing in order to effect a positive behavior change. It involves a deep understanding of an identified target audience in order to better understand the barriers that exist and what might be helpful in motivating them to change,” wrote Vont Performance Digital Marketing.

Moreover, according to the website, the message needs to be fun, easy and popular. Targeting is key and enables you to more closely reach your specific audience. Social media platforms offer you good targeting capabilities, ads are not targeted based on a keyword being searched, but rather on rich demographic and psychographic data known about social media users. Ads can promote content designed to inform and engage the target audience and, therefore, “capture” the wanted audience.

You can also do programmatic digital advertising and use Landing Page/Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).”Targeted ads with calls-to-action that lead to specific landing pages work in tandem to lead your audience to you – and to the specific action you wish them to take. Optimizing the landing page (CRO) further increases the likelihood that the action will be taken,” added Vont.

“Your target audience is (usually) not you. You may think you know them – but do you really? One of the most important pieces of Behavior Change Marketing is having a deep understanding of your target audience. How they think, feel, act…where they hang out, how they talk, who they trust, etc. Don’t assume – do your research. In-depth quantitative and qualitative research is critical in developing an effective behavior change campaign,” explained Ethos Marketing on its blog.

Moreover, the blog shows that when it comes right down to it, Behavior Change Marketing isn’t entirely different from traditional marketing, in which we attempt to convince people to buy a product or service. Behavior Change Marketing is also transactional, but instead of goods we barter with behaviors. “Before you can make someone change their behavior, you need to uncover what’s in it for them. What matters to them enough to change the way they act? Research tells us that this is different for different audiences. In order to affect behavior change you need to alter the perception of the desired action (or inaction). If the goal is to recruit those teenagers back over to Facebook (or away from social media in general), we need to convince them there is a fun, easy, and wicked cool reason to do so.”

Start step by step and keep it up.  Be in continuous connection with your target, follow it, research it, interact with it, use an integrated communication to make sure the consumer feels you are with him all the way.  Don’t just use digital and PR, digital, use traditional and interactive tools as well. Social media, video, direct mail, and experiential marketing all play a part in giving the target audience the knowledge, will and skill to change.

Moreover, make sure you are measuring all the time, in all the campaign’s stages. It’s the only way you can actually see if your process has results or not.