How to Choose the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Business
Social media offers a tremendous platform to introduce your business to a wider audience and interact with customers digitally. Leverage social media for business to strengthen your brand, stay in front of existing customers and raise brand awareness, all while driving conversions on products or services. Here’s how to prioritize the right platforms to invest time and resources effectively.
Which Social Media Sites Should I Use for My Business?
Different industries derive value from different platforms. B2B brands lean toward LinkedIn while ecommerce businesses love the massive reach and on-platform shopping features of Facebook and Instagram. Deciding which playground to hang out in can streamline your content creation and improve efficiency.
Use the social media platforms that:
- Don’t exceed your social media managers’ time budget
- House your core audience – ideally, in dominating numbers
- Are compatible with the content you want to share
- Provide business results that are worth the effort. (This one takes time to figure out.)
Determining the must-have social media accounts for your business depends on your audience and goals. Just remember: You don’t have to do it all. It’s better to select one or two platforms to excel in than to overtax your resources by being somewhat active in five or six.
Check out our video to get details about the factors you should consider. Then keep reading to see pros and cons of popular social media platforms for businesses.
The Benefits of Social Media for Business
The advantages of social media marketing as a business include:
- Brand Awareness and Recall – When your audience reads copy written in your brand voice and sees visuals with your brand’s look and feel, it increases brand familiarity and trust. Even if they scroll past your content quickly, they’re reminded that you’re there whenever they’re ready for you.
- Lead Generation – By liking your business’s page or following your content, users express interest in your company in a low-effort way. Eventually, you can entice them to click to your website and provide their contact info. You can also use social media advertising with lookalike audience targeting to reach people who are similar to your followers.
- Communication – Social networks are communication channels where users can interact with your business directly. Using social media is your chance to prove your brand’s trustworthiness and overall value. All you need to do is engage your audience and respond to them appropriately.
- Social Listening – Through customer reviews, comments, private messages and shares, you can see for yourself how your brand is being received and talked about. Analyze your account manually to see these insights or use an extension for additional social listening functionality. Then use the information to improve your business!
Related: How to Improve Your Marketing Efficiency
Choosing the Must-Have Social Media Accounts for Your Business
Every social media platform offers different features and layouts. We’re giving you the breakdown of all the top social media platforms so you can evaluate each one.
We’ve included notes about:
- Platform pros and cons
- Which platforms typically resonate with certain audiences
- Which platforms are most appropriate for B2B vs. B2C business models (In general, LinkedIn and Facebook work best for B2B, while all platforms are fair game for B2C.)
Let’s jump right into it!
Facebook – The Original Social Media Account for Businesses
If you’re just getting into social media marketing for your business, regardless of business model, we recommend starting with Facebook. Your business’s Facebook profile can function as a small snapshot of your website, featuring useful information such as your contact information, hours, location and upcoming events. Many other social platforms don’t let you include this much detail!
Facebook is a fairly low-effort social media platform compared to some others because you are not required to include visual content with each post. We recommend using photos, video and graphics anyway, so you can turn more heads and keep the algorithm happy. Posts with graphics, photos and videos get more engagement and more reach. Keep it fun and post share-worthy content for brand awareness.
Burger King showing off some personality in their Facebook marketing while keeping their audience updated on current products.
Press Play When You Market on YouTube
As the second most-visited site on the internet, YouTube is a high-volume social network as well as a search engine. In addition to boosting your rank in Google search, YouTube has the potential to generate high traffic volumes. YouTube content is highly linkable and shareable, integrating extremely well with other marketing such as other social channels, content marketing strategies and email campaigns. Building and executing a YouTube marketing strategy takes a lot of resources, though, as it’s highly important for businesses on YouTube to regularly create video content to stay relevant on the network. That content can come in many forms – from webinars to explainer videos. Just make sure that you have the resources to produce great video content before you invest too much in marketing on YouTube.
YouTube is a good platform for B2C brands to invest in because more U.S. adults are on YouTube than on Facebook. Users watch YouTube videos to learn new things, watch news and follow their favorite content creators. Take this opportunity to establish your brand as one of those top content creators by showing off your brand’s personality and services.
Make Reddit Marketing Work for You
If you’ve never dabbled in Reddit, it’s time to get acquainted with a strong, loyal audience. Reddit is a social news and entertainment platform where mostly younger users post content to sub-communities (called subreddits). The most popular content is pushed to the front page, where the best content from all the subreddits is viewed by the masses (think: Quora).
Use subreddits to segment your audience, promote deals and interesting news in the right communities and employ customer service by managing your own brand’s community. Digital marketing on Reddit takes dedicated time and effort to post engaging content and interact with your audience.
Related: Advertising on Reddit – Everything You Need to Know
How to Use TikTok for Business
It might seem like a losing game; plenty of people only think of TikTok as the app of dance challenges, capitalizing on the latest viral sounds and duets that don’t go quite how anyone imagined. But TikTok is a huge opportunity for businesses. With over 1 billion monthly users, it’s hard to pass up an opportunity to get in front of so many eyes – and you shouldn’t!
Developing a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
As the top-rated social network for B2B lead generation, LinkedIn is all about networking with your connections to promote your brand. On LinkedIn, content marketing is key. By publishing valuable content on your LinkedIn page or by sharing existing content that’s relevant to your brand, you can foster connections. Expand your network as your business takes part in a conversation with other industry thought leaders. You can also join LinkedIn Groups that align with your business to discover connections within your industry.
Here’s some extra insight about LinkedIn marketing from Tessa, one of the people behind the Oneupweb social media accounts:
“LinkedIn is a network already built for professionals looking to interact with businesses. Encourage employees to engage with the platform. Your business page can share their personal statuses, which is a great way to reach new audiences.”
Insight into Twitter Social Media Marketing
Twitter is full of business updates, recent news and more. Marketing on Twitter is driven by using relevant hashtags and joining conversations to build your posts’ momentum. You may not think of Twitter as being great for business, it can be! Several large B2C companies such as Burger King, Old Spice, Charmin, Netflix and others regularly pour their creative energy into Twitter. Twitter’s format and algorithm offer lots of potential for content to go viral. With thousands of retweets and likes, these brands have been catapulted into the timelines of thousands of users. By successfully building the signature witty tone of the rest of the site into your Twitter marketing strategy, your company could do just what these brands have done.
The main con? Succeeding on this platform can be time-consuming. There’s no way to guarantee a viral tweet.
Twitter is a great place to showcase your wit and creativity, making it a good platform for both B2B and B2C brands with strong brand identities.
Successfully Marketing with Pinterest
With more than 400 million users, Pinterest is a highly underrated social network. On Pinterest, users (the majority female) “pin” clickable images that lead back to a company’s website. From wedding planning to home improvement tips, it’s easy to fill your Pinterest marketing strategy with “how to” and “inspiration” content. Since Pinterest is photo-forward, you should use beautiful, clean visuals to entice users to pin your content. It also helps to make your full channel have a cohesive aesthetic. Before you build your Pinterest business account, this is a great time to do some customer research to find out if your user base is on the site at all.
The Benefits of Instagram Marketing
As a highly visual platform, Instagram is best for highlighting your products using photo and video content. If you don’t have the resources to make content like that, you may want to steer clear.
By using hashtags, your business can be discovered as users browse topics related to your brand. While your brand’s content needs to beat the tough algorithm on Facebook to reach your full potential audience, on Instagram, your content will appear alongside content from the user’s friends and peers. Once you have an account, we have plenty of Instagram marketing tips to help you create a professional Insta.
Building Snapchat for Business
While initially conceived to send quick photos and videos between friends, Snapchat has evolved to be a social network that can be leveraged by businesses – mainly B2C. Post to your story and create filters for events, promotions or simply everyday brand awareness. Make exclusivity a part of your Snapchat marketing strategy by showing behind-the-scenes content. As Snapchat’s mostly younger users swipe through their friends’ stories, they’ll also find yours right there with them. Have a partner with a large following? Consider doing a Snapchat takeover and spending a day or two communicating with their audience.
How to Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts for Business
When all is said and done, the right social media network for your brand is the one you have the time and energy to maintain. Building a presence across several social channels will help you reach a larger and more varied audience – but only if you have the bandwidth to post relevant, inventive and engaging content regularly.
Get Social – With Us
If you need help creating dynamic content for social – and perhaps adding a platform or two to your marketing strategy – check out Oneupweb. From robust content calendars to social media management, we provide any level of support our clients need to make their marketing powerful.
Let’s get started. Reach out online or call (231) 922-9977 to share your business goals with us.
