Marketers report that social media has helped increase exposure 88% of the time, followed by traffic growth 77% of the time. This implies that if you aren’t utilizing social media to the utmost extent, you’re passing up a significant opportunity. It can be difficult to choose your social media outlets because there are so many available.
Establish Your Social Media Objectives, Strategy, & Goals
Establishing a social media plan is crucial for small businesses because it helps you reach your target audience, build brand awareness, and boost sales.
Social media has a lot of advantages, but before you start using it, it’s crucial to have clear objectives. Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) objectives ensures that the process of developing a social media strategy remains reasonable and doable. Apply this strategy to your social media marketing strategy by basing the objectives on data unique to your company.
To start, you could concentrate on some of the most popular advantages—increasing website traffic and raising revenue.
Which Social Media Platforms Should I Utilize for My Business?
Prioritizing what’s important to you is the first step in choosing the right social media platforms for your business. Does it broaden your horizons? Does it produce more leads? Is brand awareness a factor?
The next step is to choose the platform that would provide you the proper exposure to the right audience. Is your brand particularly visually appealing and hence well-suited to sites like Instagram or TikTok? Is it geared toward in-the-moment happenings more suitable for Twitter? Or is your audience diversified, necessitating a mix of media like LinkedIn and YouTube?
How to Limit Your Options
There are far too many social media networks available for you to be active on them all. Your time would be better spent on websites that can assist you in achieving your objectives. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp are the most popular in terms of active users.
Find Out Which Channels Your Audience Uses
It’s not a good idea to pick a platform that your audience doesn’t use. As an alternative, determine which social media channels your audience likes and target them there. Use analytics to identify your audience’s demographics and behaviour.
Evaluate the Kind of Content You Produce
Different social media platforms operate well with different sorts of content. Instagram is primarily about images and short videos; therefore, it may not be the appropriate place to post long-form content like white papers. The kind of content you produce will rely on several factors, including your brand and sector.
Blog posts: For audience engagement, business blogs may be equally as effective as personal ones.
Podcasts: Work with influential people in the business to reach their audience on social media. When sharing, use hashtags to broaden your reach.
Testimonials: Your customers are your most valuable asset; therefore, leverage their feedback and experiences to advance your brand awareness.
User-generated content: This is the holy grail of content since it’s produced by brand enthusiasts rather than by you. Discover some fantastic UGC campaigns for inspiration.
Live streams and webinars: Live video is excellent for interacting with viewers and discovering more about your audience, especially during a Q&A session at the end.
Ebooks: A terrific way to generate leads since ebooks may be very valuable to potential buyers.
White Papers: This type of content is ideal to demonstrate expertise in a certain market and to attract leads through downloads.
Videos: The pinnacle of content, videos may greatly increase your audience if one of your creations becomes popular online.
Images: Using photos to highlight your staff, your business, or simply something amusing may help increase traffic and engagement.
Match the Right Platform to Your Goals, Audience, & Content
Once you’ve decided on your social media goals, identified where your audience is, and chosen the best kind of material to share, the best social media platform for your purposes will become clear. To assist you in making your choice, here is a list of the major platforms, organized by audience size, functionalities, and user demographics.
Facebook for Business: The largest platform now is Facebook, which has 2.89 billion active users each month. Facebook’s advertising platform may be heavily tailored to specifically target audiences, making it excellent for lead generation. Video is also incredibly popular; Facebook Live, which is well-liked by consumers and saw a 26% increase in popularity in 2020, is expected to keep growing. Although Facebook (and Twitter) are both fantastic for reaching enormous audiences, it’s crucial to keep in mind that there is fierce competition, so your material must stand out.
YouTube for Business: 74% of adult Americans watch videos on this video platform, which has over 2 billion active users per month. It offers tremendous potential for connecting with your audience as the second-most-visited website behind Google. To make your YouTube channel successful, learn the essential steps to starting it up and growing your following.
WhatsApp for Business: WhatsApp is used in more than 180 countries and 60 languages. As of 2021, it has 2.2 billion users. Ideal for directly messaging customers, the business app comes with tools to help sort user messages, automate responses, and manage your customer service. In addition to customer service and marketing, WhatsApp for Business is good for e-commerce and direct sales.
Instagram for Business: Instagram has two billion active users and is expected to hit 2.5 billion users in 2023. Like Facebook, it has functionality that lets you break down your audience demographics into categories such as gender, age, nationality, language, and more. Moreover, the platform lets you create social ads very easily.
Twitter: Twitter is smaller than most people think; only 186 million people, on average, use Twitter daily. That said, if your content is short (or if you want to amplify your content on other platforms, such as your blog), Twitter is the place to be.
TikTok: 25% of TikTok users are between the ages of 10 and19, and 22.4% are in their twenties, so the younger reputation of this platform is well deserved. As of 2021, it has one billion users. On top of that, the average TikTok user opens the app 19 times a day. In fact, the popularity of TikTok has caused other platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook, to launch their own short video functionality.
Pinterest: 445 million people use Pinterest, and 90% have tried something they’ve seen on the platform. Half of the users are American, and three-quarters are women. Most interestingly, two out of three users search on the platform, seeking out new products and ideas.
LinkedIn: Basically Facebook but for business professionals, LinkedIn has 900 million users in 200 countries. Of those, 39% pay for the service, which has multiple membership tiers. Moreover, 58 million companies are registered on LinkedIn. Though it has B2C applications, most content on LinkedIn is decidedly B2B.
