3 Best Social Media Channels for Inspiring Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople

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By Jacob Maslow

Limiting the best social media channels for aspiring entrepreneurs to just three is challenging. The truth is those who are thinking about starting a business or who want to launch a business career need to be on many different social media channels.

Social media channels have niched, so you may pick some that suit your targeted audience. Those may be smaller for networking but may have more potential customers. However, there are plenty of social media platforms to choose from for general business purposes, building networks, and driving traffic. 

LinkedIn

The one everyone in business must include in their social network is LinkedIn. It is the go-to platform for business. It has many ways to promote yourself or your business, and connecting with others to show them your profile or resume is easy.

That is the beauty of LinkedIn. Your picture, resume, and history are up there so other potential partners, employers or investors can see them.

Another great thing about LinkedIn is you can eventually link to those who can bring a lot of money to your business, as many CEOs are on it. After all, it has 830 million members.

The difficulty with LinkedIn is two-fold. First, you must pay for some features, and its format can be a bit intimidating to use at first. There is a learning curve to it. It can take a month or so to figure out the best way to meet the right people, as your friends and family are your first connections.

The platform is strict about knowing a person before inviting them to connect.

Another issue with LinkedIn is that you don’t automatically connect personally with people where you can talk with them one-on-one. So you have to put in some effort to do that, which isn’t terrible. But, for a young entrepreneur, it would be nicer to have more accessible connections where you meet people and get to ask them questions.

Facebook

Another must-have is Facebook. While Facebook has had issues and criticisms over the past year, the fact is that most people still use it in some way. It remains a force in social media, and most people will give you some credibility for being on it.

It allows you to build a business page for outreach, reviews, upload pictures, and promotion. The Facebook page can be a separate webpage as it has the same type of design. Plus, you can buy cheap ads that reach your exact target audience, and it has analytics.

The drawback of using Facebook is its censoring. Those who also have personal pages where they express opinions may also find their business pages shadowbanned. The other issue is some people who don’t like you, for whatever reason, can report your page or put up a bad review, and there is little you can do about it.

Check Out Sites With Your Viewpoint

Those who have issues with shadow banning on Facebook, especially for political views, may want to lean into that stigma and join one of the many growing conservative sites. They have millions on them, and while it’s harder to find smaller niche groups, most are easy to get to know people quickly.

Check out specialized business platforms and sites to promote your business as they want to encourage entrepreneurs. Many will support you because you share the same values, such as producing products made in America or sustainable business implementation.

Alignable

A third, little-known social platform for business is Alignable. This is such an underrated platform that many in the national media aren’t even talking about it. Yet, it has six million members that reach into 30,000 communities. Alignable can be a powerful tool for entrepreneurs because its primary feature is connecting you with others in your community.

It promotes meeting in person to get to know each other, discuss businesses, and how to help one another. It also has an excellent forum where other entrepreneurs answer questions from those going through issues.

Another great thing about Alignable is they connect you nationally within your industry but locally with other businesses in your community. So, you get the best of both worlds of finding out about your industry while networking in your community.

Alignable is one of the best for actually finding out about funding too. Plus, it’s free.

Conclusion

You can’t join everything at once. That is far too overwhelming for an aspiring entrepreneur. Instead, join one network and learn it. Then, add another. Keep adding until you feel you have a well-rounded social platform that helps your business grow.

Don’t be afraid not to join some platforms. There are hundreds out there, and you can’t join them all. Instead, pick the ones where you can do the best networking, get good information about starting and running a business, and where your potential customers are gathering.

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