Introduction
With the current pandemic, social media has become an ideal way to engage with your clients or customers actively, and social media marketing is now on the rise.
Have you embraced it?
It has become a necessary marketing tool for every business that wants to remain relevant and visible in the online world. Social media is one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing available that provides a massive return on businesses’ investments.
This means that if you aren’t using social media right now, you’re missing out on a substantial profitable opportunity.
As a business owner or eCommerce entrepreneur, you need to understand the importance of social media and how it adds value to your business. Social media has bridged the online communication gap, broken down barriers between companies and their customers, so they no longer have to interact face-to-face.
From generating leads, boosting sales, increasing brand awareness, and improving traffic, social media marketing is one marketing tool you need to be a top brand.
Your business needs a social media presence to thrive.
Before we get to the 5 top social media platforms, let’s discuss the importance of social media marketing.
Why Is Social Media Marketing Important?
Social media provides businesses with an immense opportunity to engage and convert prospects who habitually log on to it and are exposed to other businesses. No matter what type of business and who you market to, social media is a marketing tool that can help you grow your brand.
Here are a few reasons why social media marketing is worth tapping into –
- Social media marketing drives targeted traffic to your website – if you’re business with a website, access to customers on social media helps you boost traffic, particularly when you have new site content.
- Social media marketing provides an opportunity to legitimize your brand – by producing content that creatively highlights your company’s core values, brand voice, and the unique qualities that your services provide through your shared posts.
- Social media boosts your online visibility among potential customers – with your social media content, you get the attention of prospects, build brand awareness to promote your business. You can reach more local, regional, national, and even international prospects.
- Social media marketing helps you understand your audience and how to build a relationship with them – through social media, you’ll be able to gain insights into your consumer behaviors. You can identify their pain points, improve sale conversions, produce great content, more compelling posts and refine your marketing strategy.
- Social media marketing allows you to jump on trends and use them to your advantage – there are always trending news opportunities waiting. If you can jump in and engage with them while everyone is paying attention through viral posts, you’ll boost your sales and which equals greater online visibility for your brand. This strategy is known as newsjacking, and you can make the most of it while the trend or news is fresh.
- Social media marketing gives you unbeatable ROI through ads – social media ads are cost-effective! You get more control to strategically focus on the posts that matter most to your audience and boost them to bring in a lot of traffic and sales.
There are so various reasons why social media marketing is essential to your growth as a business. It’s also a fun way to express yourself on a lighter note, show what your brand is about by building rewarding connections with customers.
5 Top Social Media Platforms For Marketing
If you’re ready to start a solid social media marketing strategy for your business, or maybe you are trying to improve the current one, and you’re wondering which type of platforms you should be on, your choice will be based on several reasons such as –
- Your audience
- Your kind of business
- Your goals
- Your type of content
- Your industry
- Your website’s analytics and more
For instance, an interior decorator will likely use a different platform from a makeup artist.
There are many social media platforms available, and the ones you use can play a significant role in your social media marketing success.
Successful social media marketing requires both strategy and creativity to enhance your brand’s overall visibility, reach your audience and strengthen your brand.
The number one key to effective social media marketing is identifying the platforms where your audience spends most of their time, so you don’t spend time engaging with a nonexistent audience.
In this ever-changing space with lots of distractions and disruptions, It’s important to know the right platform that enables you to understand your target audience’s characteristics to create content that resonates with them more appropriately.
Here are five top social media platforms for marketing you should use
Number of active monthly users – 2.6 billion
Demographics: Men and women, ages 18 – 65 or older
Facebook is the largest, most popular, and widely used social network globally with more than two billion+ users, making it a top social media platform for any business. This platform guarantees you access to new or existing customers and prospects who have active Facebook accounts, which is why it’s a top social media site for businesses.
Facebook has an incredibly productive advertising platform that’s outperforming other platforms and great for lead generation because it can be customized to target specific audiences. It allows you to target your ideal audience by a wide range of factors like age, gender, employment, interests, purchasing behaviors, relationship status, and more. This means you have the power to put your ads and content right in their newsfeed!
This platform is an excellent humanizer that helps you build relationships by turning your leads into loyal followers and customers through appropriate content that shows your company’s human side.
Regardless of your business goals, be it brand awareness, website traffic, lead generation, online conversions, using this platform for social media marketing will make a notable difference in your business.
How – With Facebook, you can build a fantastic business profile that will include links to your website and details about your business, products, and services. Owning a business account gives users access to review your business.
You can then post regular updates about your business in the form of live videos, photos, and video uploads. To increase engagement, you can also “like” other pages and answer your customer’s comments or messages. You can also create a personalized experience for your customers through private groups where they can join, interact, ask questions, and more.
Number of active monthly users – 1+ billion
Demographics: Men and women, ages 18 – 64
Instagram is one of the youngest social media platforms perfect for brands or businesses targeting a trendy, young, urban demographic. This visual platform initially started as a platform for sharing photos. With its amazing new features, you post pictures or short videos with a caption or create live videos and stories that disappear after 24 hours.
Your customers can interact with you through tags, likes, comments, or direct messages.
It also integrates with your Facebook and Twitter accounts so you can use the same posts across multiple platforms.
Instagram allows you to maximize the power of storytelling by enabling you to show what your business is about, your values, products, or services, and not just tell. It amplifies your brand personality and voice.
How – It’s the best social media marketing tool to reach a younger, mobile and digitally inclined audience. Create a consistent posting schedule with engaging photo and video content relevant to your brand to capture attention that leads to conversion continually.
If you’re an eCommerce business, you can take advantage of your target audience that’s typically shopping on mobile, with the new “Checkout” feature that allows your customers to look at your product pictures and buy them directly from their Instagram account.
Number of active monthly users: 330+ million
Demographics: Men and women, ages 18-49
Twitter is easily one of the most accessible social media platforms that are always buzzing with a steady stream of information and new content per second. An active Twitter account allows any business to update its customers on the go.
If your business is about immediacy, and if you always want to give your customers real-time updates, this is the best platform for it. The best contents for this platform are easily digestible images and character-limited text-based content.
With Twitter, you can list and link company information in your profile, engage with new potential customers through hashtags and viral trends. You tag customers in posts, retweet positive customer tweets, and respond to customer questions via tweet or direct messages.
How – Use your Twitter account to stay ahead of your competition by consistently engaging with your audience with multiples tweets per day, ensuring that they add value enough to convert. Create posts on viral trends and hashtags for more traffic.
When used in social media marketing, Twitter can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and connecting directly with other customers and media influencers who can promote your business.
It also makes an excellent tool for rapid customer service response.
Number of active monthly users: 303+ million
Demographics: Men and women, ages 25-64
LinkedIn is the best choice for any B2B business with lead generation goals.
It’s a great way to establish your business as an expert in your field and build authority that makes you stand out as a leader in your industry. With your editorial content, you can engage leads through conversations that lead to conversion.
It’s a thriving community of business owners who connect professionally, making it more formal than other social media platforms.
You can include more accurate information about your business, employees, job positions, work email addresses, and more on this social media platform.
LinkedIn emphasizes career-related networking between B2Bs, and it’s a networking tool exclusively for professionals in various industries.
If you’re looking to expand and recruit more professionals, LinkedIn is the perfect tool for you. With its advertising platform, you can target a lot more specific job titles and hire easily.
How – You can create a business profile, build an audience of professionals from your industry, then posts and publish updates and relevant content. You can interact with your audience via messages and comments. You can show off your brand with it and tailor your content to expand your professional network.
Youtube
Number of active monthly users: 2 billion
Demographics: Men and women, ages 18-65 and older
YouTube is a unique video-based platform that allows you to watch videos and upload visual content to target your audience.
Using videos like tutorials, product reviews, instructional videos, unboxing, and more, you can share information, keep your customers engaged, drives traffic, and leads to conversion.
For your social media marketing strategy, YouTube is a powerful tool for businesses because your videos show up on Google and YouTube search results once you upload them. You can promote these videos on your other social accounts, and for more organic traffic, optimize your videos for YouTube SEO, so they get quality views.
How – With your YouTube video channel, you can connect with your customers in a totally different way than other social media platforms. You can create and upload content-rich videos that educate or entertain your customers. It’s a great way to show off your business’s personality.
Ensure you optimize your business’s YouTube videos with the proper keywords to make them have higher search rankings. With your YouTube account, you gain access to Google’s advertising platform, and you can use this to your advantage when running YouTube ads.
Conclusion
To remain relevant and gain the necessary online exposure you need, you need adequate social media marketing. It’s an indispensable tool that connects you with prospects, builds your brand awareness, finds new leads, generates more website traffic, and boosts sales.
Choose the right social media platform for your business, produce relevant content that your target audience will be interested in, and level the playing field with your social media marketing campaign.
As you run your social media marketing campaign on your various platforms, don’t forget that you don’t actually own your follower list or your profile and posts.
If your accounts shut for any reason, you’ve lost a significant number of your target audience and customers unless you get the account back.
We advise that you also focus on growing your email list using your social media followers as leads. It’s so easy to do, and you can download our free ebook to get started. (insert link for the ebook
At Top Content Marketing Agency, our content creation skills are second to none to give you substantial results to grow your business like never before!
Contact us today; let’s create a winning strategy for your business!