Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for your Business
There are many social media channels available today for your business that you can utilize to retain and engage customers and to promote your brand and information about your company. We have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and YouTube as social media platforms. With so many social media platforms, it’s hard to choose the best one for your business. It’s very crucial to have an online presence to promote your business, but where to start with so many options out there? Here is what experts say. According to Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute, “Only commit to the channels that you can consistently deliver valuable information to. That means you might only activate content in a few channels and use the others as listening posts.”
According to Michael Stelzner, Founder and CEO, Social Media Examiner, “Choosing the right social media platforms comes down to asking, ‘Where are my customers?’ Go there if they are on Snapchat, Get there if they are on Pinterest and if they prefer live video, it’s time to adopt Facebook live.” The content that you share on any of the social media channels depends on the target people that you are trying to reach and your objective for each stage of the customer lifecycle. So it’s important not only to post merely on any social media site, but also to build relationships with your audience consistently. Which social media platform you will choose for your business depends on your brand and what you’re trying to accomplish. Your social media activity needs to happen on a channel where it will be the most useful and where you have your target audience’s presence. So here is what you need to know about each social media platform and what they do for your business.
Facebook is the most popular and the most widely used social media platform. According to Pew Research Center, 71% of American adults who are internet users are Facebook users, and the global news says that there are more than 1.59 billion and 1.44 billion active mobile users who use Facebook every month. Facebook not only offers you a way to connect with your friends and family but it is an essential platform to communicate with your target audience and to promote your business and brand.
The Facebook page of a business profile is the central hub for your brand promotion and information. The Facebook page can make your business discoverable, allows you to connect one-to-one relationships with your followers, and helps you to reach a wider and deeper audience insight. It also works well with Instagram. The post that goes well on Instagram also goes well on Facebook. Here are Facebook’s features that help you to grow your business insights and reach.
Facebook groups Facebook groups are useful for elaborating your business’s passion and connects people to share your ideas, business news, and insights. It is a path for the people in the group to start and engage in conversations. More members your group has means it gets more promoted to networks and friends which increases the growth of your business. Facebook groups are a great way to create awareness of your business and to increase inbound traffic and loyalty.
Facebook Live Video Facebook live videos are real-time video posts that you can share on your timeline and on to your follower’s feeds. Live video can be an important part of your marketing strategy because of its increasing popularity. You can cover events, do interview parts, share any announcements, and can share educational broadcasts of your business. The live video provides the brands the opportunity to share what they think right there with their audiences.
Facebook Tabs Facebook tabs are great to promote assets, landing pages, and other essential items. Tabs help the user to navigate through your content such as photos, events, and videos and can be used to host a different variety of apps ,which in turn help your business to extend its capabilities like running contests, promoting offers, connecting to other social media accounts, hosting a landing page, and more.
None of the brands and organizations can ignore the power of Twitter. Twitter is the social media platform where people and the world news breaks gather to discuss the industry’s news, their day to day works, pop culture, and business promotions. It has 320 billion monthly active users and has proven its crucial role in any marketing mix. It is valuable when it comes to staying up-to-date with what’s happening in real-time in the world. It’s not the place to acquire new customers. According to Gary Vaynerchuk, “Twitter is the water cooler of society.” It’s the place for all trending topics and news, to share short length updates, and to search for something that you might need an answer to. Twitter is counted as microblogging because of the short and the disconnected messages that it delivers. What can Twitter do best for your business?
- Twitter can provide your business with a real-time communication channel for the rest of the world.
- Multiple posts or tweets per day can be very helpful and is recommended due to its short timespan.
- Tweets with video and images show a high level of engagement.
- Tweets with two hashtags work better than the post with multiple or no hashtags.
- Twitter paid advertising options are highly targeted and customizable.Users can interact with promoted tweets, promoted trends, and promoted accounts.
LinkedIn is the most popular and the greatest professional social media network with more than 400 million members across the world. LinkedIn is a great social media platform to reach the business mindset audience as it has expanded its solution beyond the hiring and networking platform to a highly rated advertising solution and includes robust company pages. A business can create their LinkedIn profile and showcase their products, employee networks, ongoing and upcoming events, status updates, and an article or blog posts. Users can follow a company profile on LinkedIn to learn more about the company. If you are in search of candidates for your job posting and want to make it up to a great value recruiting talent platform, then LinkedIn is the best platform for you. The more you have your presence on LinkedIn, the more you have the opportunity to become a thought leader in your space. You can use LinkedIn Pulse to engage with the key influencers and to keep track of the breaking industry news. You can encourage employees to participate in LinkedIn groups and Pulse to build up their professional network and to generate awareness about your brand and business.
Instagram is the best social media platform to share your photos and videos. It is becoming more valuable for the marketers these days, with more than 500 million active monthly users. From B2B companies to a customer brand, it’s showing its popularity for sharing interesting quotes, images, videos, captured events, content runs, and office culture posts. The Instagram Hashtag feature of Instagram is a powerful one which is used for engagement of your audience. It acts as a keyword to find images for a particular search. Hashtags are very useful to get more followers and to establish your business brand as an industry leader. Instagram Paid Advertising feature allows marketers to advertise through a wide variety of photographs and videos. You can promote your content as a seamless multiple photo carousel ads to the user’s Instagram feed. Instagram advertising offers direct sales, conversions, and subscriptions. Instagram is the social media platform where you will get high levels of engagement. Even sentiments on Instagram are more powerful and positive than platforms such as YouTube. Instagram is best for the people who want to have a visual and physical appearance like makeup businesses, photography businesses, travel and tourism businesses.
YouTube
YouTube was founded in 2005, and today it’s the biggest search engine in the world after Google. YouTube is ideal for DIY videos and tutorials aimed at niche audiences and for the brands that want to track conversions. YouTube is the best place where you can share your video content with the world. It’s good for attracting traffic as almost one-third of the people on the Internet are on YouTube. It’s free to create a YouTube account and add as much video content as you want. All the contents on YouTube are searchable via YouTube and Google. Your video titles should be clear, customer-centric, and descriptive so that users can find your content easily. Your video description should be of two to three sentences with targeted keywords. YouTube is not only helpful for your video content, but you can also take advantage of its advertising feature. YouTube advertisement allows marketers to showcase your ad to the targeted audiences based on your content.
Pinterest is ideal for a design-forward company like a fashion or beauty products company, or you can say it’s best for female-focused companies. Pinterest is all about images and visuals. Almost 42% of Pinterest users are women. If your product includes fashion products, makeup products, art, home decor, food, or anything else for which you can create beautiful images and graphics, then yes Pinterest is the place for you. You can make it easier for the buyers to purchase a product by clicking on a Pinterest Buy button.
Periscope
It’s difficult to generate consistent engagement on any platform, but Periscope can help in driving engagement quickly. Periscope is a live-streaming platform linked to Twitter. It broadcasts live videos from your phone. Both the video creators and viewers can share the broadcast on Twitter for increasing the exposure. Including Periscope in your marketing strategy can bolster the results of your Twitter campaigns. Now the question which might arise is, how is Periscope different from Facebook and Instagram live video features? So here is the answer. Periscope is the first social platform that is linked to Twitter and that has live broadcasting. If your push notifications are allowed, then your followers will be notified when you go online. Your live broadcasting will stay there in Periscope for 24 hours. Both you and your follower can share your video on Twitter. You can even autosave your live broadcast as a video to share it on other social media networks. If you want your video to be engaging, and shareable, then here are some best practices that you can follow on Periscope:
- As Periscope is partnered with Twitter, you can use hashtags to your video description to get more engagement.
- You can turn on your Twitter post which automates the process of sharing on Twitter even and can get you more views.
- Interact in real-time with the viewers. It’s challenging to shoot, broadcast and answer to your viewers, but it is beneficial if you do so.
- Your Twitter followers can get notified when you go online on Periscope. So go live on peak times and activity hours when you think you can get more engagement and views.
Conclusion
Every social media channel defines a specific purpose and has a particular role, and they are the key to your success. You have to choose your effective social media platform. An effective strategy for managing social media platforms can help you build your strong online presence. But you cannot achieve this without knowing which channel will work and result in the best for you.
So first understand what your strategy or main objective is, then look for the channels that your target audiences are using and which channels your competitors are using. Then look for the type of content that you are creating and the number of channels that you can manage. You are going to dilute the impact of your efforts with too many social media channels, and your brand’s visibility can suffer from too few social media platform use. So it’s better to start with small and few channels and then add new channels to your marketing strategy as you grow up and become confident about the content that you are producing.