Social media is an essential aspect of your marketing campaign. Businesses really can’t afford to skip on their social media efforts, especially these days when social media is such an integral part of your customers’ lives.
There are many options available regarding the different social media platforms available to use. If you’re wondering which platform is best to use, then you’re in the right place. This blog will outline the most popular and effective platforms businesses use today to increase their brand awareness, engagement rate, and conversion rate.
The most common social media platforms used by many businesses include:
- Youtube
Bear in mind that no single platform is most appropriate for all businesses. Depending on your type of business, different social channels have different benefits. To most accurately determine your social media needs as a business, consider the following questions:
- Are you a B2C or a B2B business?
- What do you hope to achieve with social media marketing?
- Who is your ideal audience?
Types of Social Media Platform
Facebook currently boasts over 2.7 billion active monthly users. (Statista) Given its popularity, Facebook is a great platform to use if you want to increase your brand awareness and open a clear line of communication between your business and your audience. With the option to share posts from your website, news articles, post status updates, and reply to user comments, Facebook lets you communicate with your audience easily and directly.
Facebook is an invaluable social tool, especially for smaller businesses. Besides sharing posts and interacting with customers, you can tailor your Facebook Business account to highlight important information and updates about your business, such as your opening hours, location, and contact information.
Facebook also allows you to live-stream and post stories. This lets you keep your audience and customers up to date in real-time about what your business is doing and what you can offer.
Twitter enjoys almost 330 million active monthly users. (Statista) Twitter allows you to post short updates (max. 240 characters), reply to comments, and share links and posts. Twitter isn’t for every business. With its character limit on tweets, Twitter is best suited for brands and businesses with a distinctive brand voice and personality.
If your business’ online presence is heavily image-based, or your brand voice is not yet fully developed, then Twitter might not be the most appropriate platform to use.
Still, Twitter can be a great platform to handle customer service effectively. Many customers, even those queries, don’t want to take the time to email or call your business. It can be much easier to tweet your brand and get a reply in the comments. This also opens the interaction to the public.
If you have a good handle on your customer service, Twitter offers a great opportunity to demonstrate that you are listening to your customers and that you care. It also lets you significantly improve your brand reputation.
Instagram is one of those most successful social media platforms out there, with an estimated one billion active users as of 2020. (Statista)
Instagram is a visual-based platform, which means that image and video content is king. If your business is a visual-based, as in graphic design or fashion, then Instagram is undoubtedly a great choice.
Even if you are not a visual-based business, Instagram can still work for you. Like Facebook, Instagram allows you to share stories and live-stream. This means that you can provide your audience with real-time insight into your operations as a business. Customers today value transparency and authenticity, so letting them in on your process is a great way to instill trust.
YouTube
YouTube is the biggest video-sharing platform globally, with approximately 2 billion monthly users as of 2020. (YouTube) Users can create, upload, and share content easily on YouTube.
YouTube is an effective platform for visual-based, creative, or educational businesses.
The quality of your content always matters, and this is especially true for YouTube. If you plan to use YouTube to support your campaign, make sure that you have skilled video editors and producers at hand. The competition is high on YouTube, so you really can’t afford to skip on content quality.
It can be helpful to create a YouTube channel for your business. However, if you don’t plan to create and share much video content, you can still benefit from YouTube. There are many influencers on YouTube who may be willing to collaborate with you in your marketing efforts.
You can reach out to influencers who have expertise in your niche, and offer pay in exchange for brand support. Influencers can reach a niche audience, which means that if you find the right one and collaborate, you will likely see an increase in high-quality traffic to your site and socials.
LinkedIn currently has over 300 million active monthly users. (WeAreSocial) LinkedIn is the go-to platform for professional networking and B2B marketing. Professionals worldwide use LinkedIn to increase their visibility, collaborate with other professionals and businesses, and gain valuable insight into industry-specific updates and trends.
On LinkedIn, you can join groups and forums to pose and answer questions. LinkedIn boards are a great opportunity to showcase your professional expertise to like-minded, growth-oriented individuals. You can also publish and share blog posts. If you share content on LinkedIn, make sure that it aligns with your brand values and is relevant and useful to your audience.
How to Use Social Media for Business Growth
Other than finding the right platform to use, you also need to know how to use social media in general to promote business growth. Here we have outlined a few things to remember when using social media.
Be Consistent
Posting high-quality, relevant blogs consistently improves your reputation on social media. When you are consistent, you exhibit professionalism. Once you have developed a consistent posting schedule, try to stick to it as much as possible. When your audience knows when to expect your posts, you are likely to see higher engagement rates.
Know the Audience
If you want to reach your audience effectively, you need to demonstrate an in-depth understanding of their wants, needs, lifestyles, and customer preferences. Many social media platforms allow businesses to use on-site analytics tools to measure engagement. This is especially useful for smaller businesses who want to assess their success level with a new business account.
Monitor Your Competitors
When it comes to social media, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Identify similar businesses with a similar audience and see what they are doing on their channels to be successful. Of course, you can’t steal their content or ideas. Still, you can most certainly look to other businesses for inspiration, especially if your business is new to social media, or if you haven’t quite figured out how to approach social media marketing just yet.
In Conclusion
Social media marketing is growing in popularity and shows no signs of slowing down. As a business, it is more than worth investing your time and budget into social media marketing, if you haven’t already. Your customers are on social media, so you should be too.
