If you are reviewing exclusively with Amazon, Fat Wallet, NewEgg or any other entity (there are many out there now, and many more I don’t even know about) you may want to increase your visibility by posting reviews across a wider social network.
The benefits are two-fold. Having a wider audience can help give you more visibility and respectability, but also it makes you more likely to be sought after for more reviews. Of course this is not mandatory for getting more reviews to come your way, but it certainly can move things along.
I personally have found that the sellers I work with are very pleased when they find out that I not only posted a review on the site they approached me about, but I also took the extra step to post the review via YouTube, Twitter, Google+ or Instagram (without them even asking). Some sellers are now even requiring that reviews be posted on other social media outlets as a condition of being able to review. That seems to be becoming more prevalent I notice.
I have profiles set up specifically for reviewing so as not to co-mingle my public and private life, but doing this has the disadvantage that you have no followers when you start and have to build them from scratch, which is not the easiest of feats. Facebook tends to be harder to build than YouTube because it is built on existing relationships or brand recognition, but each network will present some challenges if you are starting at zero. My philosophy is that you have to start somewhere, and it doesn’t hurt to try. I would recommend YouTube and/or Twitter as the two easiest platforms with which to gain followers.
If your friends will not be annoyed by your review posts, and you don’t mind meshing your personal life with your review life, then using the social media outlets you already subscribe to may be the better route to go.
For the truly dedicated reviewer, you might even consider a social media marketing tool such as Hootsuite (free for a basic account) to schedule posts across platforms. I use Hootsuite Pro in my job as a marking specialist and have just recently started using the free basic Hootsuite for reviewing. It is invaluable for organizing and tracking posts and feedback when you are sending out a lot of messages on social media. Hootsuite isn’t the only marketing tool of its kind out there, there are quite a few others- but Hootsuite is by far the most popular and widely used.
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