People are spending more and more time on social media apps, and a lot of those people are potential customers for your business that are waiting to discover your brand.
As of 2021, the number of active users of social media is over 4 Billion and these users spend at least 2 hours on their social channels of choice every day.
For small businesses, that is a 2-hour window every day to promote products, build brand awareness, and engage with loyal social media followers.
For businesses that successfully harness the power of social media, they will gain the following benefits and more:
Social media will continue to play an ever-increasing role in helping businesses drive sales and improve brand awareness, and that’s why we wrote this article to help you discover the best social media sites for your marketing campaigns.
It’s one thing to recognize the importance of social media marketing, it is a different thing entirely to know how to pick the right social media channels for your marketing campaign.
A business that primarily sells its products to teenagers may succeed with an Instagram marketing campaign, but a B2B business may not gain any traction on the platform.
The social media channels you select for your campaign must be popular with your target audience, and the content you share on those platforms must resonate with your audience.
Below, we will outline the 8 major social media platforms and explain how you can promote your business on each platform.
Facebook is the king of all social media platforms with over 2 Billion monthly active users and a diverse demographic – a presence on the platform is a must for every business.
Every business will find its target customers on Facebook due to its share size and the diversity of communities on the platform.
There is a wide variety of advertising options and Facebook provides extensive tools to help businesses create ads that are targeted towards a specific demographic of customers.
LinkedIn is the social media network for business professionals and 4 of 5 people on the platform drive key business decisions. This makes LinkedIn the perfect social media platform for B2B businesses.
If your business sells products/services to other businesses, your social media marketing strategy should prioritize LinkedIn.
It is also a great platform for advertising job openings and recruiting talent for your business.
Instagram is a highly visual social media platform that lets users post photos, videos, and short-lived stories. Users cannot post text-heavy content.
The highly visual nature of the platform makes it suitable for product-based businesses. The dominant demographic on the platform are people between the ages of 25-34 and they spend an average of 29 minutes on the platform every day.
If you are looking to market your products to teenagers & young adults, and you sell highly visual products like food, cosmetics, fashion goods, and others – Instagram should be part of your social media strategy.
While Instagram is the social media platform for visuals, Twitter is a microblogging social platform that drives global conversations.
The platform has over 300 million users and 500 million tweets are sent every day on the platform. It is the ideal platform for brands that have a content-centric marketing strategy and want to be seen as an authority in their industry niche.
With Twitter, you can tweet links to your content, share your opinions on trending events, and hone a unique voice for your brand.
This Chinese social media app went global in 2018 and it has managed to acquire 1.2 billion active monthly users in just a few years.
The platform lets users create 15-second short videos which can be combined into a 60-second long video. The platform is popular among teenagers & very young adults (60% of users are aged 16 to 24), and you will find all sorts of content on the platform including viral music videos, dance videos, comedy skits, tutorials, and more.
It isn’t a social media platform for making sales pitches, instead, it is a great platform for engaging creatively with a younger generation of buyers and building brand awareness.
Snapchat is another visual social media platform that is popular among young adults. Users can post videos and photos that will only stay live for 24 hours.
The platform is mobile-only and 67% of users in the U.S are between ages 18-29. If your target customers fall within this demographic, you can use the platform to generate awareness about product updates and to promote events.
This is a discovery social media platform where users find creative inspiration and concepts for personal interests, design work, and hobbies.
The platform lets users pin (post) images and videos on a theme-based board that will be accessible to other users on the owner’s feed.
The platform is filled with boards about food recipes, interior decorations, fashion, weddings, design themes, and more. Users can add links to their pins which makes it a great avenue to drive traffic to your site.
84% of users are female, and people of all ages use the platform. This is an ideal social platform if your target audience is predominantly female and highly visual content will resonate with your customers.
Research shows that 85% of internet users consume video content every month and 56% want to see more video content from businesses that they patronize.
Video is the future of marketing and YouTube is the dominant social video platform. The platform is the second most visited website on the internet and it attracts 2 billion monthly active users.
Buyers use YouTube videos to better understand the features of the product options available to them. 80% of customers that used YouTube in their research said they watched the videos at the start of the purchase process.
YouTube provides you with an opportunity to reach customers during the decision-making stage and influence them to pick your products over other alternatives.
You have discovered the 8 best social platforms for promoting your business, the key features and dominant demographics on each platform.
Now, it is up to you to select the best social channels for your brand and build out an active presence on those channels.
