Social media has become an essential tool for digital marketing, and yet it is also incredibly challenging to use effectively if you are unfamiliar with the various platforms in play.
The first question to answer is which sites and services are worthy of your time, and which can you safely ignore.
Best Social Media Platforms to Use for Your Business Marketing Needs
Eventually, your growing business will need to expand across several different platforms, in which case using a CRM for social media to manage this process should be a priority.
Here is a look at the services you should put at the top of the agenda today.
Boasting an active user base of more than two billion people worldwide, and attracting literally millions of businesses as well, Facebook rides high at the top of the social media marketplace.
Its popularity and maturity as a platform help to make it appealing to marketers because of the sheer variety of advertising feature it offers. Whether you want to post videos, stream live content, create time-sensitive Stories to engage customers, or leverage more traditional paid-for ads, all this and more is a possibility.
Facebook is also ideal for location-based marketing campaigns, allowing you to focus your efforts on audiences in specific geographic areas, to boost engagement rates and improve ROI.
Owned by Facebook and thus fairly similar in terms of its marketing features, but with an even younger and more engaged user base, Instagram has become a social media marketing stalwart in recent years.
The Stories feature, also available on Facebook, is one of the most potent ways to connect with customers, as brands can use it to share updates, showcase behind-the-scenes images and videos, run surveys and polls and even sell products directly or embed external links to boost sales.
YouTube
Although best known for providing users access to trillions of hours of videos free of charge, YouTube is also a potent platform for marketing because it has effectively become a search engine in its own right. This is no surprise given that Google owns it, but it is still worth bearing in mind if you want to make sure your business is as visible as possible.
There are a few ways to leverage YouTube for marketing purposes; from paid pre-roll ads that play before the content creator’s videos, to start up your own channel focused on sharing content relating to your own business, you can take your pick.
TikTok
While people of all ages use the social media platforms covered so far, TikTok is undoubtedly the scrappy young upstart which in turn appeals to audiences in their 20s and below.
The short-form videos and the collaborative, community-driven nature of much of the most popular content on this platform means that brands will need to be agile and adaptable if they want to use it effectively.
Ultimately, as with all of the social media platforms discussed, you need to consider which services your target audience are using, and use this to guide your marketing decision-making.
