While social media is essential to the way small businesses do marketing, having an online presence is not enough for your small business to thrive. Naturally, some social media platforms will make a better and more organic fit for your business than others. Let’s take a look at the most popular social media platforms and talk about which ones you should take advantage of.
Why it’s popular: Instagram is mainly popular because of one thing – it’s built around a visual medium. In a few seconds, you see the gist of everything that’s been posted from the accounts you follow, whether that’s your friend’s spring vacation, or a company’s latest product launch.
How it can help you: It only takes a second for your product to be exposed to your following, because it automatically appears on their feeds. This also makes Instagram an excellent opportunity for strategically-placed adverts and it’s ideal if your target audience is comprised of females under 35, as they make up the majority of their user base. Another unique aspect of Instagram are the way they use hashtags. People follow hashtags, so if you use them in your posts you are exposing your posts to more people naturally. Other social media platforms use hashtags as searching tools only.
Why it’s popular: Twitter is excellent for quick, short and sweet (280 characters or less!) dissemination of information, so people love it as a way to stay informed not only about news events, but also about entertaining facts, and any pertinent information brands may put out.
How it can help you: Twitter is great to announce restocks, new products, special offers, or to take the pulse of the community with polls, questions, etc. In addition, it’s also a perfect way to stay fresh and relevant in your audience’s minds – a lot of companies Tweet out an interesting fact of the day or link to their new blog posts or other fresh content that their audience may be interested in.
Why it’s popular: Facebook spread like wildfire and soon enough, everyone was on it. And that’s because it’s a bit of everything – you can keep up with friends’ pictures, read news you’re interested in, and find out all the latest information about your favorite brands, hobbies, products, etc.
How it can help you: Facebook may not be what it once was in terms of popularity, but statistics show that a whopping 2.2 billion people are still active users, so a lot of your core audience may still be on this platform. Posting Facebook-specific content is sure to increase engagement and even sales, because people spend between 27 and 41 minutes a day on Facebook – and that’s time you can take advantage of.
Facebook offers personal profiles, business pages, and groups (public and private). Depending on your goals using one or all will benefit your business.
YouTube
Why it’s popular: YouTube became popular because of its human quality. Creators were all just regular people making videos for other people who shared their same interests, or with the aim of teaching their audience something, sharing something interesting with the community, etc. That exploded into YouTube becoming the go-to not only for educational purposes, but also for entertainment.
How it can help you: YouTube would especially benefit those companies who need to demonstrate how their product or service works, or otherwise provide explanations or tutorials.
Choose Strategically
All in all, the takeaway here is that social media is definitely a powerful tool – but you need to use it wisely. Your time is expensive, so spend it carefully curating your social media presence on the platform that benefits you the most, instead of trying to appeal to every demographic.
Guest post by Stephanie Soloman
