Know Your Social Media Platforms - The Basics
Incorporating a healthy selection of social media platforms into your marketing mix enables businesses to reach their customers and share great media and content regardless of the format. In this blog post, we will explore the best social media platforms for a growing business.
With over 2.8 billion active users, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. It offers businesses the ability to create a business page, connect with customers, share updates, and run targeted ads. Facebook is suitable for businesses of all sizes, but it's especially useful for B2C businesses.
Over the years facebook has become an incredibly popular place for pages to host video content and livestreams. If you plan on producing a lot of visual media as part of your content mix then facebook provides a lot of potential to grow your audience.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing platform that has over 1 billion active users. It's ideal for businesses that rely on visual content such as fashion, food, and travel. Instagram offers features such as stories, IGTV, and reels that allow businesses to showcase their products and services creatively.
Instagram is owned by Meta (parent company of Facebook) and enables seamless sharing between the two platforms. Utilising Facebook for Business you can effectively post to the two platforms and monitor activity, engagement, and messages.
Twitter is a social media platform that allows businesses to share updates, news, and interact with customers in real-time. With over 330 million active users, Twitter is ideal for businesses that want to build brand awareness and engage with their customers.
Twitter presents an opportunity to create conversation between you and your audience, but it’s not for everyone. Supermarket brands have utilised twitter to deal with customer service and provide real-time feedback to customer complaints. There is however, a potential risk of being memed on this platform. Surprisingly though Twitter actually allows larger photo files than instagram, making it a better platform to post images. You can post images in 4K to really deliver detail and depth.
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform with over 740 million active users. It's suitable for B2B businesses that want to connect with other businesses, find new clients, and share industry news and insights. There is a constantly growing user base of content creators on LinkedIn, however the platform is notorious for picking up on trends and quickly changing the algorithm to favour paid content over organic.
That being said there is still a great opportunity to post videos, photos, and host live streams on the platform to create engagement with your audience. Blogs and articles are also a big hit on LinkedIn - you can easily create a frequent newsletter on the platform with images and links that will provide valuable information to your audience and grow your consumer base.
YouTube
YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine, and first-largest video platform with over 2 billion active users. It's ideal for businesses that want to share video content such as product demos, tutorials, and testimonials, vlogs, reviews, podcasts, and more. YouTube can help businesses reach a wider audience and build brand authority and credibility.
The only downside is that YouTube is heavily saturated with channels all fighting for viewer attention. Growth in this area is tough, but not impossible, and by using the other platforms in your mix you can drive more traffic to your Youtube videos, while also establishing a new audience on the platform.
This platform also supports live streams, and has recently implemented a TikTok-like video sharing method called Shorts which allows you to establish a healthy content mix on the platform.
Conclusion
Choosing the right social media platform depends on your business's goals, target audience, and the type of content you want to share. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are some of the most popular social media platforms for businesses. By leveraging these platforms, businesses can grow their following, connect with their target audience, and drive business growth.