Not all social media relates to your business: the business of connecting.

Everyday a new start-up social media company attempts to be the next Facebook or at least get bought out by them. It would appear that all it takes is a fancy logo, offices with a water slide and a silky voiced receptionist to get the attention of the mega media Bond villains in their hollowed out volcanoes. There are so many online sharing, communicating, picture swapping, stumbling, tweeting, pinning, linking, instantly know what I had for dinner apps, pages and invite only social media companies, that it’s becoming impossible to keep up. Are they all the same? And how do you choose which ones work will for you?

For everyday personal stuff it’s easy – the ones that suit you will be obvious, but when it comes to business; for the act of promotion, communication and hopefully in the end ‘selling’; not all social media is born equal.

Obviously there’s Facebook and Twitter and let’s be clear: you need to be on both of them, because simply, they are the biggest and most used platforms globally. But what about all the rest? For the sake of time, for my sanity (and yours) I won’t try and list all of them, but there are a few worth mentioning.

Depending on what type of business you have (or want to have) you’ll probably have been exposed in the course of your research to platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube or Google+. All of these have uber amounts of subscribers but will they actually benefit you?

Let’s start with Pinterest; whilst it is a novel idea it’s rapidly becoming a forum for food porn and things I made earlier – so unless you you’re an aspiring chef or creative genius with pipe cleaners it might be more of a vanity platform.

Instagram? Well we’ve all seen ‘Rich kids on Instagram’ and thrown up a little watching a bunch of over financed youths lounge on cars that would solve a third world country’s water shortage – so it’s really just a forum for people with too much time on their hands, weird light filters that make your lunch look other-worldly and more food porn (unless you’re a wealthy, creative type who wants their food to look purple). As an alternative I would recommend Flickr. Simple photo portfolio that allows you to share, copyright and organise your media for easy use – what could be better?

Videos? They’re helpful right? Well, maybe. But that all depends on who’s watching. YouTube is the bored person’s friend – where life can be explained by cute kittens in boxes and dogs who can’t catch things. YouTube used to be the place to showcase your talents and see how many people are awake at 3am, now it’s more a time wasting exercise. As an alternative let me recommend Vimeo – very similar to YouTube and will easily let you embed their videos practically anywhere. So what’s the difference? Well, Vimeo is taken seriously and isn’t the wide world of cute pets and funny accidents. Creative people use it to showcase their work and for this reason it gets targeted traffic.

Google+ – don’t bother. When they first came out the whole world signed up and then promptly forgot it existed. On paper it might have millions of subscribers but in reality there are more people using Bebo (You remember – think back, way back) on a regular basis.

So what’s good, innovative and more importantly useful? A platform I recently discovered is called Stumble Upon it allows you to add pages you like (which can be your own) for other people to ‘stumble’ on. Based on your tags and interest your pages will be added to the void and as people view articles, pages, blogs etc. yours will be shown to them – a whole readymade group of like-minded people. Just make sure your content is good and get stumbling.

Before I leave you to scratch your head and take some pictures of your lunch (we all do it) a quick word on organisation. Nobody has the time to post to every platform every day or even every other day but there’s help at hand. Hootsuite was the first, biggest and best of these and allows you to schedule posts across all the platforms so your days are free to actually do some work. Now the good people at Hootsuite have decided that money is their ultimate goal (and really why shouldn’t it be, they are after all a company in a capitalist-centric free-market) and they’ll charge you for anything over 3 feeds. But for small businesses in need of every penny there are alternatives; my personal favourite is Over-graph. It does exactly the same things as Hootsuite but is open-source and completely free (the magic word) regardless how many feeds you add. Time saving is the key to success and this platform will help you do that.

Social media isn’t about directly making money, it’s about exposing your products and skills to the world and keeping anybody interested up to date with any developments, promotions, or thoughts you may have about jam (but only if you’re a jam maker). So choose wisely and find ways to streamline your social media management to the feeds you really need.