BLOG: Top 5 Social Networking Sites for Businesses in 2013

According to pewinternet.org, 75 percent of women reported using social networking while 63 percent of men reported using social networking in August 2012.  

As the internet has become increasingly more powerful and important in people’s lives, so do social networking sites. Facebook has been the most visited website for a few years now, which shows how important social networking is to our world. So if almost 70 percent of people are using social networking wouldn’t it be a profitable idea to make one for your business? Well, the answer is most definitely yes! Numerous new social networking sites are developed every year, but only a select few “make it.” Here at DCR we have made social networking a huge part of our business so we thought it would be important to introduce you to the reported top five social networking prospects for 2013 that could help your business!

The most “business like” one is one called Conversations from the creators of hootsuite.com. Conversations is basically a business style internal chatroom. It is set up much like Facebook chat but the main difference is that with Conversations you can invite whoever you want into the chat stream. This would work great for getting teams together to talk through a project over the internet. You can even invite non-users of conversations to join into the conversation. When you find something you like you can retweet it or post it onto your other social networking sites. Conversations is an easy to use internal business tool and I expect it to make huge advances this year.

If you are a fan of Pinterest or Instagram you will love this one. A new iPhone and Android app called Flayvr organizes your photos on your phone into easy to access files that you can tweet or post on Facebook. Flayvr will make it easy this next year to post albums quickly and without having to do more than simply tap your screen. You can name the albums whatever you like and share them with anyone, wherever you are. Businesses can use Flayvr to post and share albums of events or upcoming products instead of having to take the time to upload individual pictures into an album. Flayvr will get rid off the clutter of photos on your iPhone or smartphone and make it easier to share ALL the pictures you love.

Do you like sending photos and videos to your friends and colleagues? If the answer is yes then there’s a new iPhone app for you! Chirp is the newest way to share links by utilizing a certain type of wave that is all around us: sound. When you find a link you want to share you simply hit the chirp button on your iPhone and it sends out a high frequency sound that iPhones are able to pick up. Then that link shows up in the receiver's inbox and they can view it and share it with whoever they want. Links can be pictures, videos, websites, articles and much more. You can also hook up your iPhone to speakers or a television or radio broadcast to chirp your link to even more people. Chirp could be an easy way for people to give out business cards or show people their company’s website. In my opinion, Chirp is of the coolest new social networking apps out there.

What do you do if you just rearranged your office space and put in new decorations but you aren’t sure whether it really looks good or not?  Maybe you are decorating for an event? Creating new marketing materials? Thumb it! Thumb is a new crowdsourcing app out for Apple and Google Play. If you post on Thumb you could get a response within just a few minutes from their huge user base. This is a great way to get a wide range of opinions on anything you can take a photo of ... which is pretty much anything.

Are you tired of reading blogs about one direction and “so called celebrities” that you’ve never heard of before? If that is the case, than you might want to look into getting a Medium account. The makers of Twitter have created this new site that is based off the idea that “sharing ideas is what moves humanity forward.” This blog site was created to filter out the pointless blogs about Justin Bieber and cats and only allows deeper blogs the right to gain popularity. This is accomplished by reading something and recommending it to others, therefore increasing the likelihood that it will be read by others and gain popularity. People can make collections of blogs that they can invite others to read. So if you want to read some blogs that actually contain some value than this site is for you.

Social networking has become an important piece to our society. These new sites provide some insight into what the future of social media will be like. Now that you’ve read this click the links below where you can explore these sites and apps yourself. Hey, maybe you will even sign up for the ones that you find value in!

Here are the links:
Conversations: http://hootsuite.com/features/conversations
Flayvr:  http://www.flayvr.com/
Chirp:  http://chirp.io/
Thumb:  http://thumb.it/
Medium:  https://medium.com/

Thanks for reading!

~Intern Dan