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A well-run social media page is as good as any other marketing strategy designed to drive conversions for your business.
Brands looking to find out which social media platform works best for their business must first ask themselves this: what does social media mean for your business?
Is it the first mile for your brand’s user experience? Is there enough appeal to make users interested without needing them to search about your product or service? Does your brand embody customer values like care, expertise, or consistency? These days, social media users are not easily impressionable, but it pays to offer them something that aligns with their interests.
Social media platforms can be sticky. Making the right landing with your audience can go a long way to driving business conversions because your brand is top of mind. According to Malcolm Gladwell, the person who coined the term stickiness refers to an idea, concept, or product as being “sticky” when it is residually brought up repeatedly, and acted upon by masses of people.
With over 103 social media sites to date and growing, it may seem impossible to dip your brand into every nook and cranny of the social media landscape – because it is. But the good news is that you may not necessarily need to.
For any marketer looking to build their social media strategy from scratch, a worthy consideration is that your users may not just be on one social platform entirely. The user base for social media platforms often overlaps. It may be ill-advised just to limit your brand presence and advertising to one channel – unless you are utterly confident that your audiences are not anywhere else.
Lucky for you, this blog is a breakdown of the top 5 social media sites that could prove useful to your marketing mix and how you could direct your efforts in targeting the exact audience profile needed for your brand.
- Active social media users: 2.895 billion
Today’s largest social media giant continues to grow steadily in the number of active users amid new changes and players in the social media landscape. It continues to hold continued relevance for businesses looking to reach large masses of people with over 2 billion active users — amounting to 25 percent of people globally.
The benefits are multi-fold for the 200 million small businesses worldwide that are relying on Facebook to scale as of 2021. With Facebook Pages, businesses can easily share essential information, including contact details, business and website addresses, and product offerings.
Besides just sharing your business information, how you want to engage with your Facebook users is freely left up to you, whether for community building or driving traffic to your website. With Facebook Recommendations, customers are allowed to leave authentic feedback about your business publicly, allowing social teams to work on transparently providing desired standards of service.
In addition, customer engagement is intuitive on Facebook with its integrated messaging system, meaning that businesses can quickly respond to inquiries without ever leaving their page, increase customer satisfaction, and streamline their communication channels if need be.
Being the most business-oriented social media platform, Facebook has the tools to drive traffic to the masses with scale, provide essential information about your business on-site, and streamline communication lines with ease. By leveraging the volume of social media users on Facebook’s platform, you can build a stellar online presence in little time by understanding your target audience and delivering what they expect out of your business.
- Monetizable active user count: 1.393 billion
Instagram is incredibly popular for a good reason, and chiefly due to one reason only — highly visual content. In this area of social media, images and videos are in trend above all other formats that include text-based mediums, like blogs, reviews, and discussion-based forums. Everything is materialized by way of photo and video-sharing on Instagram.
It is no coincidence that the younger demographic would take to this format well as their preferred choice of social media, as a combined 674 million global Instagram users are aged between 18 and 34 years old. According to Lyfe Marketing, 72 percent of all teenagers use Instagram, and 67 percent of all young adults under the age of 30 use Instagram.
Businesses that want to take advantage of a growing user base each year need to find a way to resonate and align themselves with a younger generation of customers. Understanding what makes a brand tick on Instagram is crucial to succeeding in this tightly-competitive market, where the charm is your differentiation strategy.
Businesses have a pressing incentive to include Instagram into their social media mix. When it comes to finding information about a business or a product, 70 percent of shopping enthusiasts turn to Instagram for product discovery. If you liken this to a shopfront, having not only relevant content but stylized to your customer’s preferences is a sure way to bring one foot into the door.
More on that, since 2020, Instagram has introduced the ‘Shop’ tab, transforming it as an alternative last-mile destination for your customers. ECommerce businesses powered by Shopify and BigCommerce — on top of Facebook Business Manager — can enable an alternative way for their customers to purchase products from their Instagram page.
If you are in the business of selling a lifestyle to your audience, Instagram is prominent for being a great social media platform to achieve high brand awareness and stay on-brand. The steps to get there may look simple but have to be done correctly. The use of high-quality content, responsive customer service, and applying hashtags cannot be understated.
TikTok
- Monthly active user count: 1 billion
TikTok has turned out to be quite the irrepressible social media powerhouse, giving the likes of Facebook and Instagram a run for their money when it comes to the number of active users. TikTok’s user growth is a proven testament to the value of short-video content, in which 15 seconds is all the time you have to maximize your creative wits.
The value of operationalizing your marketing strategy on TikTok is the assurance of market reach. Brands that run ads on TikTok have the possibility of amassing significant brand visibility where sources show that it can reach 10 percent of the global population, regardless of age and location.
From fast-food enterprises to brands in the automotive industry, creating content on TikTok means pushing social relevance to your brand image. Whether for comedic purposes or “infotainment,” TikTok’s algorithm filters and provides content directly to your audiences based on what they like to see, intentionally or not.
For established brands, the benefits of the video-sharing platform are two-fold as it becomes a gateway to repurposing user-generated content and building brand awareness with scale. By starting their own “challenges” with their branded hashtags, marketing efforts can be self-propagated, way beyond what traditional and even digital forms of media could.
For small or new businesses, investing your marketing resources on TikTok has an exponential impact when done correctly. Brands have to consider what they want out of their TikTok audience. Whether for educating, attracting future talents, or bringing traffic to their website, thinking of how your audience may find value through viewing your content is key to ensuring continued success.
- Monetizable active user count: 790.4 million
LinkedIn prides itself as “the world’s largest professional network.” As the label implies, the market on LinkedIn differs from the rest of the other social media platforms in its user behavior. Career applications and business networking are among the primary reasons for the platform’s differentiation, as users showcase their job title and work experience front and center. It is arguably the most used social media platform for business.
From the brand perspective, marketers can leverage LinkedIn strongly to promote effective corporate branding. LinkedIn users can often observe established companies using LinkedIn to signify thought leadership within the industry, emanate positive values and accentuate goodwill through corporate social responsibility.
While being in that business-centric ecosystem may be good to establish brand authority in your industry, one thing to keep in mind is that if your company is primarily B2C, you are more likely to procure business partners than new customers. However, that is not to say you cannot generate new sales from LinkedIn, but your marketing communication should be personalized for professionals in the workplace environment.
Like moths to a flame, people are innately driven by curiosity. By framing your message that sticks out because it is different from the usual B2B content on LinkedIn, the chances are that your content will attract more eyeballs. With the Covid climate reinforcing workplace fatigue, brands can do well to take the message outside of the workplace and project esteemed lifestyles beyond the familiar old.
Focusing big on customer testimonials or emphasizing innovation can leave positive impressions on the social media platform, driving brand engagement in the process.
- Monetizable active user count: 436 million
In recent years, Twitter has built a reputation as a hotline for allowing customers to reach brand representatives accessibly. Its straightforward and fuss-free text format allows audiences to search effortlessly, tag, and mention businesses via their social handles.
With 80 percent of social customer service requests happening on the social media platform, Twitter is one of, if not the most important tool in how people engage with brands directly online. The social media app is cost-effective in marketing your brand and nurturing prospective customers with the right messaging openly.
Having your communication strategy rooted in Twitter gives marketers the ability to connect with customers more authentically. Twitter is all about community engagement. Responding to key inquiries promptly with tact and nuance – almost like having a unique brand voice – is integral to securing consumer trust. Customers would much rather listen to a human person than take words from a scripted bot. They could go to your website’s FAQ section for that.
With people openly discovering and tagging your brand, it provides marketers the opportunity to build the perfect buyer persona. Customer data is freely available, putting businesses in the driving seat to understand the different types of consumers who seek your product and services. Don’t forget that knowledge is power – consumer sentiment is key to crafting more incisive social media marketing campaigns that resonate strongly with your consumers’ needs and expectations.
Level-Up Your Social Media Marketing Strategy with Insights Across Multiple Data Sources
It is imperative for marketers today to understand their performance quickly and precisely, which means not getting overwhelmed by juggling multiple excel sheets and navigating the clutter of noise from separate social media apps.
Working to improve your brand recognition on social media comes down to staying rooted in the online landscape and informing your audience when the opportunity beckons. You do not want to miss out on updates from your competitors because your market research just so happens to exclude a particular social media channel.
Digimind Social, is a holistic solution to your social marketing needs, with clear dashboards and actionable insights to keep your consumers in your sight. Having to consolidate consumer data is challenging enough, but grasping what they all mean? Social Intelligence is critical to discovering and bridging new consumer gaps and staying alert to future trends and changes in the broader industry. Customer behaviors may always be in flux, but brands have an onus to make consumer experiences consistent.
Discover Digimind Social with a complimentary demo and experience what it is like to listen intelligently.
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