Which Social Media Platform is Best for Your Business
When joining social media for your business, one of the first decisions you’ll be faced with is which platform you should use to promote your services. There are several different social media tools available with each platform that offer different, unique instruments crucial to promoting your business.
The three main social media sites that companies tend to use to connect to their followers are Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. In order to fully maximize the use of each of these platforms, it’s important to know what purpose they individually serve and how that can best help you accomplish your objectives and goals. Keep reading to learn about the three most popular social media platforms and how to decide which you should use for your business.
Facebook’s main purpose is to connect people. The platform allows you to create engaging networking opportunities that connect with people and local resources. From a user standpoint, the platform is mostly used to stay in contact with friends and family, sharing photos, videos, and life updates, as well as connecting to their favorite businesses.
For businesses, Facebook is a great way to host information about your business and connect with your local community especially. With a Facebook business page and account, you have the opportunity to access many effective advertising tools and receive constant analytic updates. You can customize your page in great detail, including contact information, hours of operation, and the services that your business offers. You can use this platform to create events, join and interact in local groups, and share updates on your general operations.
With over 2 billion users actively using Facebook on a daily basis, Facebook is the most widely used social media platform, making it a good place to start for your business’s social media strategy. Of those 2+ billion users, it spans a wide variety of demographics, but users aged 25-34 make up the biggest group of users. Over half of those over 50 years old use Facebook as well.
On Twitter, this platform’s main purpose is to share ideas and opinions and is often used as a vessel for fast, real-time news and trending topics. Unlike Facebook, Twitter isn’t used as much for personal connections as it is to network on a wider, more global scale in order to stay up to date on what is happening around the world. It encourages short and quick engagement, with a 280-character limit to tweets making it easier to digest information and respond accordingly.
While Twitter is a great way to create short updates and release fast-paced news regarding your business, this type of content is not best for all industries. It tends to be less beneficial for service-based industries that rely on images or connections with others, especially local businesses. The site is uniquely beneficial for customer service and support as many big companies are able to quickly respond to any issue consumers have with your services.
If you have a unique voice that can engage well using short content, this is the perfect social media platform for your business. One unique ability that Twitter offers to engage with followers and other users is retweeting and liking relevant content from other brands that promote the same messages as you.
When trying to decide if Twitter is the right social media platform for your business, take into consideration the amount of time and resources you have to devote to it. Twitter is where a lot of brand conversations can take place, so it’s an important platform to be listening to feedback on, but it might not be as much of a priority as the other social media platforms in this list.
On average, Twitter has roughly 330 million active users every month, over 3/4 of which claim to use Twitter as their main platform to receive news. Of these hundreds of million of users, the demographics tend to be users aged 18-29, with fewer users in the older age ranges.
Designed for the sharing of pictures and videos, Instagram is being increasingly used as a place of business connection, especially with the rise of content creators and influencers. As the social media platform is so visually based, this is great for showing off your gorgeous travel locations.
Like all social media platforms lately, Instagram is trying to keep up with all the new features of its competitors, which means there are several different features you can use as a business on Instagram, including regular Instagram posts, Instagram Stories, Instagram TV (long-form videos), Instagram Reels (short-form videos), and live streaming. You can also create a business account on Instagram, which gives you access to greater insights about the reach and conversion of all of those different posts.
If you’re considering using Instagram as a main source of marketing for your business, it is essential that you are able to provide strong visual content in order to achieve high levels of engagement. Instagram is primarily a mobile application, although there are third-party scheduling platforms you can use to manage your Instagram on a desktop or laptop. Even though Instagram users do expect to interact with brands and businesses more frequently on the social media platform, it is still a platform about connection and authenticity, so make sure you’re ready to spend some time actually being social over on Instagram!
With over a billion daily users, it’s recorded that over half of Instagram users visit the app every day. There are significant engagement rates on this platform and it’s a great way to attract followers to participate in your content. Location and account tags also offer an excellent way to get user-generated content.
Tips for Using Social Media as a Business
1. Post Consistently
In order to get the best engagement rates from your followers, it’s crucial to make sure you upload content consistently. Followers and users will engage more when you give your business more opportunities to be seen on their screens. It can be helpful to create a posting schedule so you don’t post too much or too little, keeping you on a frequency that will produce the best results. This can also push you to be more creative and research inspiration for new content.
2. Have Fun and Be Creative!
If you want to maximize your followers’ support, you need to have a strong and unique social media presence. Sticking to dry, corporate content won’t always cut it for smaller businesses. Finding ways to make your content more fun and engaging can help your brand stick out and incentivize users to follow your profile and want to learn more about your business. When doing this, research the demographics of whichever platform you use and make sure you’re using creative techniques or trending topics that will resonate with those demographics.
3. Create a Solid Social Media Marketing Strategy
Always go into social media with a plan! It’s necessary to know who you are aiming to reach with your social media and how you can successfully reach them. Research is your best friend in this field; stay up to date on trends and news that can more easily connect you to your relevant followers. And look towards other brands that are relevant to your business in order to see what kind of social media content they produce that yields the best results. Finding inspiration from content that already exists can make developing a plan that much easier.
If you’re still not sure which social media platform is best for your business or if you don’t have the time to research the ins and outs of each one, the expert social media managers at Jetsetter Social are here to help! We’ve worked with each of these platforms and more, and we will work with you to figure out exactly where your brand belongs and how to make it shine there!
