Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok — where do you even start if you are a new company? Social media is a necessary marketing tool for every business that wants to remain relevant and visible. In fact, 88% of marketers say that social media has helped increase exposure, with 79% pointing to increased traffic as a leading benefit of using social media for marketing purposes. Today, there are over 65 social media platforms in use around the globe, so which one will give your business the most bang for your buck?
With roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2021, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Facebook has become one of the best ways to find your target audience and gain new customers. It’s also a great place to interact with your clients once you’ve caught their attention. But with so many organizations vying for consumers’ attention on the platform, it’s important you’re creating and sharing engaging content to connect with your audience. While Facebook is a tool that is right for just about any business and offers an enticing advertising program, Facebook Ads can be expensive and cumbersome if you are not a digital marketing expert.
Through photos and videos, Instagram has become an excellent way for brands to literally show — rather than tell. Whether highlighting products, service values or voices, Instagram’s photo and video sharing platform empowers organizations to connect with its roughly one billion monthly active users via visually appealing content. With Instagram being an excellent tool for lead generation, especially with the right graphics and videos, the right Instagram marketing strategy will allow businesses to promote products and services, boost the brand, and increase sales.
Leveraging a brilliant marketing strategy from the get-go, Twitter’s character limit gives everyone a voice but limits the noise. For better or worse, everyone seems to be using Twitter these days, even presidents, and the platform now has 206 million monetizable daily active users worldwide. The best tactics your organization can employ to compete with your competitors include: develop content that helps you stand out from your competition, consistently engage with your audience and contribute valuable content to the conversation with all of your posts. Twitter can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and connecting directly with other customers or influencers, but the platform needs its own marketing strategy, and you’ll need to plan for multiple tweets per day.
LinkedIn is a networking tool exclusively for professionals that has revolutionized the way we seek, find and get hired for jobs. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, with nearly 800 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. A great resource for sharing content, LinkedIn is predominantly used to help people look for new career opportunities, connect with others in their industry, and see what their peers or leaders in their industry are sharing. If you operate in the B2B space, you should certainly consider showing off your brand with a LinkedIn business page, the core function of which is tailored to individual users and expanding your professional network.
YouTube
YouTube is a video-based platform with over 2 billion monthly logged-in users that has become a place where people go to learn about new things and entertain themselves. YouTube is a powerful tool for businesses, however, the key is to make sure you are optimizing your videos for search so video content hosted on YouTube is viewed. With YouTube, you can create a video channel and connect with your users in a totally different way than other social media platforms. You can create video tutorials to back up your text-based content (like blogs), visually show product descriptions or provide your viewers with personalized press releases. Just remember to create high-quality content and optimize your titles and descriptions for YouTube SEO so that you can direct more traffic to your site and convert those visitors into customers or clients.
Reddit has more than 430 million monthly active users and over 100,000 active communities, and the website is ranked among the most popular social networks in the world. Reddit is more about genuine sharing and learning than it is about connecting and engaging. As a result, most Reddit groups have strict rules about posting for commercial purposes. However, many companies across industries have found success on Reddit by engaging with some creativity, lots of interaction and a genuine desire to learn and teach.
TikTok
TikTok is a social video app with 1 billion monthly active users worldwide. Thousands of companies use TikTok Business Accounts to find their voice and build a cohesive marketing strategy on the platform. TikTok offers performance metrics, audience insights and creative tools that empower businesses to think like marketers but act like creators. The platform consists of 15- and 60-second user-recorded videos that allow for in-app editing and integration with the other major social players. The largest demographic of TikTok users is between the ages of 16 and 24, and the two ingredients that generally lead to content going viral on the platform are pets and children. Based around community engagement and hashtags, TikTok empowers users to find existing content and make it their own. Your unique brand story and personality will differentiate you from others in the same category. By revealing your brand’s true personality, users will feel better connected to you, which helps build trust and can lead to new customers.
There is No Road, No Simple Highway
When it comes to social media, each platform has its own benefits, target market and uses. Every company’s social media plan will be different based on their needs. No matter which platforms you include in your digital marketing plan, being active on social media helps your company stand out and gets more eyes on your content. A solid social media plan should build brand awareness, connect your company with customers, boost your SEO, grow your mailing list and ultimately drive revenue. Let’s get social, if you are looking for a successful and professional social media marketing plan, drop us a line!
