Purpose Of Different Social Media Platforms And How They Can Benefit Your Business
Social Media platforms are dynamic and inevitably keep evolving.
People are always finding new ways of recording and sharing every aspect of their life. However, what if you are a business?
There are so many social media platforms out there already and every day more and more are being launched, how do you as a business decide where to start from? Should you create a Facebook or Instagram account first or maybe begin a YouTube channel?
Using social media platforms as a part of your business strategy is the most effective and fastest way of letting people know about your business. It is an excellent way of reaching your audience, increasing brand awareness, and marketing your products or services. However, its benefits do not end here. Besides these, social media platforms allow you to connect with your audience, interact with your customers, and engage with your prospects on a more human and emotional level.
To know what’s the ideal social media platform to build your business and how to make the most out of it, you need to understand the purpose of each of them. So let’s dive into the details of these platforms.
With over 2.6 billion worldwide active users monthly as of the first quarter of 2020, Facebook is one of the most and widely used social media platforms not only for personal but for business use as well.
Businesses can share updates about their products or services, publish posts and links to their website or blog post, upload photos and videos on Facebook. Your customers or people following you can visit your business profile to find out the latest happenings, updates about your products or services, and know about the events.
How to use Facebook for marketing?
The first step is to build and grow a fan or followers base on Facebook. Promote your posts by adding its links everywhere you can.
Once you have built a strong audience base, you can start utilizing the status updates and photos to publicize your products, services, or offers. You should publish interactive posts to engage more with your audience.
This way, you’ll be able to increase the likes, comments, and shares on your posts. The more the audience engages with your posts, the more frequently you will pop up in others’ timelines. However, it is essential to keep in mind that the majority of Facebook users use this platform to connect and interact with their friends and family. Therefore your posts should be able to blend in naturally in this environment. Do not make your posts entirely about selling, or else your audience engagement might suffer.
Facebook Tools You Can Utilize
Facebook today is one of the most widely used social media platforms for advertising. It utilizes social graphs and activities to discover people who fall into your target audience. This makes Facebook Ads exceptionally useful.
These ads are more probable to attract potential leads that need your products or services. Facebook ads ensure that your entire marketing budget doesn’t get wasted on the audience who are not interested in your offerings. It helps you to grab the attention of the exact people who need or want your products or services.
With more than 1 billion monthly active users worldwide, Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms allowing users to share photos and videos and connect with people.
Businesses can boost their followers base by publishing interactive content like photos and videos.
How to use Instagram for marketing?
Sharing two posts every day between favorable hours can help you widen your reach and let people know about your business. The more you post, the more people will like, share, and comment and thus increase your reach and customer base.
Half of the age demographic for Instagram users is between 17-29 years. So if your target audience falls under this demographic, then growing here can be very beneficial for your business. However, people mostly use Instagram to connect with their friends or family and engage with interesting content. Publishing content for the sole purpose of selling might bore them. Therefore, try to make your posts innovative and engaging to increase your likes, shares, and comments.
Instagram Tools You Can Utilize
Instagram is another immensely popular social media platform used in this generation.
This platform uses Facebook’s marketing system, which probably has the most potent targeting ability. With its precise targeting options, you can make sure that your ads reach the exact audience. You can specify your audience’s demographics, location, interests, etc., making Instagram Ads a useful marketing tool online.
You can reach more audiences by posting interesting and relevant content. The more active you are there, the more frequently you publish, and the more you’ll be able to appear in your audience’s timelines. These ads can bring in potential leads and help your business grow its online presence.
However, the only problem is Instagram doesn’t let you include links in your regular posts. So if you are trying to direct your audience to another webpage, it can be a little complicated, although you can add a link in your bio. You can also use relevant hashtags in your posts to reach more people following that hashtag.
With more than 336 million active monthly users worldwide, Twitter is one of the most speedy, concise, and easy means to connect with your audience. Twitter is an ocean of information where people can publish content of 280 characters or less.
The more informative and engaging your content is, the more likes, comments, retweets it will get. Eventually, your reach will widen.
How to use Twitter for marketing?
Over 500 million tweets are published on Twitter every day. It lets you share short and crisp information pieces and photos or videos. You can also include links to your website or other landing pages. Since you only have 280 characters for every tweet, you need to make every character count!
When using Twitter for marketing, make sure your content is enticing enough to make the audience take a pause and click on it. Usually, people scroll quickly through their feed, so your tweet should have more than just text to make them stop.
You can include quotes, statistics, or questions in your tweets to make it engaging. Try including GIFs, short videos, interactive images, or polls. No doubt, Twitter is an excellent way of sharing quick thoughts and great offers to draw traffic to your website, but interacting with the audience is as important as growing your audience.
Twitter Tools You Can Utilize
Hashtags (#) are the most effective tools you can utilize on Twitter to reach a broader range of audiences and not just your existing follower base.
People looking for specific information will often click on relevant hashtags to gain more insights about what’s going on. The more related hashtags you use, the better are your chances of being discovered by potential audiences.
How to use LinkedIn for marketing?
LinkedIn is different from the rest of the social media platforms as it is specially designed for businesses and professionals. Usually, people use LinkedIn to display their job experience, find jobs, and share professional thoughts. This is why this platform is vital for people involved in B2B. It’s features like “who viewed your profile” helps you in prospecting, recruiting, establishing thought leadership, etc.
LinkedIn Tools To Utilize
As compared to other social media platforms, very little to no conversation takes place in the LinkedIn profiles directly. But you can join LinkedIn groups where you can meet people from the same industry who share the same interests as you. Engaging in their conversations can help you show your expertise in the industry and expand your reach.
So, this was all about the purposes of the various social media platforms. Let us know how these social media strategies work out for you via the comments below.