What Social Media Marketing is best?
Can we say that one social media network is actually better than the other? - Definitely not
Social media is an entity that never fails to surprise. Just when you think one platform has managed to monopolise the space, another emerges out of the blue, and marketers are trying to cope up with this continuous evolution.
Social media has evolved into an unstoppable force and each social media network has different characteristics and functionalities that need to be taken into consideration; the strategy, audience, the return on investment performance (ROI), resources, advertising budget, and goals. Each social network satisfies specific needs of the users or the audience, below are those social networks that currently stand out:
Social Networking
What is the first thing that pops into your head on mentioning "social media"?
For many of us, it is Facebook because this giant platform attracts about 2.38 billion monthly active users. However, it is only one of the various types of social media platforms. Social networking is the most traditional form of social media, including platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social networks, often called "relationship networks", help people and organisations connect online and share information.
Facebook is considered one of the widespread platforms for social networking. Despite some stiff competition, Facebook remains the largest and most popular social network, with over two billion people using the platform. It was followed, in order of popularity, by Instagram, Messenger, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Your Facebook business page is the spot to blow your horn; develop your brand identity, study your audience and build trust. Don't be afraid to loosen your tie a bit, humanise your brand and engage your audience. A wide range of content can be shared on your Facebook page such as texts, pictures, and videos, enhancing user experience. It has been proven that videos and photographs generate approximately 70% of the engagement of this platform. Additionally, Facebook provides an analytical tool where companies can view their weekly performance, number of fans, and scrutinise their marketing strategy.
Given the continuous improvement of the digital marketing world, many have predicted the fall of Facebook. However, this platform has succeeded to maintain its position, seeking better features to keep its audience hooked. So lately, GIFs, polls, live streaming, stories, and memes features have been introduced to visually make the platform more friendly and advanced.
With more than 126 million daily users, Twitter has become an important part of any business's marketing strategy. Twitter is a gold mine of customers' insights and a fresh new way to promote your brand, drive sales and win more leads. Utilising key tools built into twitter allows businesses to appear more trendy and up-to-date.
Understanding how the platform works and how it should be implemented to fit your social media strategy is the key to your success. So you need to outline the components of your Twitter strategy starting with auditing your existing account, setting your goals, reviewing your competitions, assigning team roles, establishing guidelines, planning your content calendar until evaluating your efforts, and checking your progress.
LinkedIn is one of the top social networks today with over 500 million active users across the globe. LinkedIn is now a force to be reckoned with, so leverage this to improve brand awareness, foster business relationships, increase revenue, and boost conversions. However, LinkedIn is the platform for B2B marketing not B2C marketing. 93% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective site for lead generation and 80% of LinkedIn members want to connect with companies to enhance their decision making.
You can optimise your personal page as well as your company page. Once your profile is successfully established, you can share company news, upcoming events, and engaging content. This network allows you to connect with professionals in your industry as well as potential leads.
Media Sharing Networks
Photo Sharing
If you are considering the visual types of social media platforms, then photo-sharing networks are the answer. Two of the biggest platforms that specialise in photo sharing are Instagram and Pinterest. These platforms depend solely on sharing visuals and doesn't allow link sharing in posts. Like the major relationship networks, these sites are valuable for brand awareness, audience engagements, and lead generation.
With over 1 billion active monthly users, Instagram offers a visual feed showing photos and short videos with added captions, also featuring live videos and stories that disappear after one day. Something is appealing and addictive to scroll through visual feed and double-tap the heart when something is worthy. Like the social networking platforms, users can interact with others through tags, likes, comments, or direct messages.
Instagram is considered as the main revenue for many businesses. Today Instagram has over 2 million advertisers and 25 million business profiles. Instagram started to offer many advertising privileges nowadays. Besides, Instagram has been a home to influencer marketing, as over 93% of influencer campaigns are performed on this platform.
If you think that Facebook and Twitter are the be-all and end-all of social media marketing tools, you are definitely outdated. Say hi to the marketers' new best friend "Pinterest". Pinterest was well known for being the go-to site when searching for recipes, home decor, hairstyles, and fashion tips. This platform focuses on sharing and pinning photos, with over 250 million active users. Similar to Instagram, it offers a visual-content feed that includes photos with a short description. However, it allows all users to link directly to their websites or product landing pages in posts. Pinterest allows its users to post original visuals as well as pinning them. These pins form a virtual photo album known as "board". Boards save all of your Pins and distribute your content for your followers to explore.
93% of people say they use Pinterest to help them decide what to buy and 55% of the users are using the platform to find photos of new products. According to Pinterest, 83% of the users made a purchase based on the content they see on Pinterest. Pinterest users have the highest purchase intention among all the other social media users.
Video Sharing
"A good video will entertain your audience. A great video will make them take action"
Humans retain 95% of a message delivered through video content compared to only 10% of what they read on the text. That's why adding video platform to your content strategy is the perfect way to make you distinguished among your competitors. Sharing videos is the most stimulating way to get fast results. 83% of marketers claim that videos give them strong ROI and videos will make up to 82% of all consumer internets by 2021.
When it comes to video-sharing networks, YouTube and Vimeo are the leading platforms. Along with them, the traditional social networking platforms started to embrace video marketing. In the last few years, Facebook launched Facebook Stories and Facebook live. Besides, Twitter has allowed its users to launch video streams and GIFs.
When you start planning your video marketing strategy, the first question is inevitable: Which social media network should I create and publish my video on?
YouTube
YouTube has always been an entertaining tool for more than a billion active users all over the world. This platform is versatile that it can be accessed in 76 different languages. As YouTube is being touted as the world's second-largest search engine, after Google, YouTube can help improve your brand presence, increase your customer base, and multiply your reach. 1 in 4 buyers confirm having used YouTube to look up videos on a product they are thinking of purchasing. That's why YouTube marketing is considered an intimidating tool for brands. In fact, nearly half of all marketers add YouTube to their marketing plan. YouTube allows advertisers to place ads throughout videos, sometimes in multiple spots within the stream.
A video doesn't have to be fancy or high quality to drive the most engagements or be effective in the brand promotion process. All it needs is to be on YouTube.
Vimeo
Like YouTube, Vimeo is a video sharing platform that was launched by filmmakers who wanted to document their creative work and personal moments from their lives. Today Vimeo is used by more than 70 million creators such as animators, film artists, and musicians. Vimeo is smaller than YouTube and more niche with 240 million monthly viewers.
Vimeo offers marketers the advantage of producing effective video ads in their marketing plan without having enough resources. Vimeo has launched its Vimeo Create to give SMBs affordable access to video marketing tools; video creation tools, editing features, unlimited video and photo contents. Create your videos using these tools, and then let the videos do the marketing work. Vimeo makes your embedded videos look perfect, giving the customers the ability to create videos in every format and ratio. Vimeo made it easy to publish videos from Vimeo to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Marketers can also analyse statistics from every platform, together, through Vimeo dashboard. The company is offering a free trial of Vimeo Create, however, marketers will need the Vimeo pro subscription to save and share the video content they created.
Interactive Media
Interactive applications such as Snapchat and TikTok started entering the competitive world which is dominated by Facebook. Large companies are starting to experiment new interactive applications while implementing their marketing strategies. Meanwhile, marketers who are just beginning a social strategy shouldn't prioritise these interactive applications before traditional social media networking. Marketers started to think out of the box and create content in a fun and unique way to engage their target audience.
TikTok
TikTok suddenly came out of nowhere to become one of the most downloaded applications in the world, having 80 million app downloads. TikTok is all about short videos that run 15 seconds, although you can create and share 60-second Stories-type videos. Most of the users upload videos of themselves lip-synching to music videos. One thing that did change is its variety in the types of videos that people share; comedians' stand-ups, pranksters, dancers, and fashion freaks. And now we can see influencers start featuring their best products in their videos.
Although producing regular content can be expensive and time-consuming, some marketers began to utilize TikTok for promotion by creating their own channel and uploading relevant videos. In addition to their partnership with influencers who already have huge audience. Some are already planning to pay to advertise on TikTok even though, the market is not well established or popular as YouTube.
Snapchat
Snapchat is one of the top 15 most-used social media platforms in the world, with over 150 million users. Despite the massive audience available on Snapchat, businesses have been skeptical about using the platform for promotional purposes. After all, it is a challenge to use videos and photos that disappear within 10 seconds to 24 hours a worthwhile investment.
To be a successful marketer on this platform, you need to clearly understand how Snapchat works, discover affordable ways to incorporate this platform into your planned marketing strategy and create engaging stories that form a long-lasting impression on the users. Be creative and forge your own style. Share product demos, tutorials, new product announcements, behind the scenes at your workplace, discounts, industry tips, or clients' testimonials. Snapchat can be an effective tool for both free and paid campaigns. Although this platform can seem intimidating at first, however, once you have a firm understanding of the basics, Snapchat can be a visually impactful medium to promote your business.
Discussion forums
People use these networks to find, share, and comment on different topics, information, and news. There are also blogging features, and the ability to follow people and topics. Sites with user-generated content such as Reddit and Quora are becoming more popular for online businesses to foster relationships by providing quality content with answers. These networks are also excellent resources for market research. Done right, it can be a great chance to create extra traffic to your websites through linking to relevant content on your site from the asked question.
Quora
Quora is a massive question and answer website where people go to seek information. Designed to be a knowledge-sharing platform, Quora is used today by over 80 million active users. Every piece of content is generated and edited by the same people that use the website. This network allows their users to follow topics that interest them, offering an extra credit over normal search engine tools. Another feature on Quora that is helpful to users is the upvote and downvote option. If you see a response on Quora that you think perfectly answers the presented question, you can upvote it. On the other hand, if you see an answer that is inaccurate and misleading, you can downvote it. Just bear in mind that no one likes a spammer, provide quality answer and link your article to give even greater information as an option to the user. If you enjoy a more social and researching experience, then you may consider creating a Quora account. It is pretty easy for you to learn the basic functions of the website. Plus, it is free.
Reddit is a social media platform with a huge user base; more than 330 million users visit the website every month. Reddit claims to be the front page to the internet, featuring posts from its users about the latest news to pop culture, to technology, to comics, to film, to literature, to the weirdest things in the world. Registering an account with Reddit is free and does not require an email address. In addition to commenting and voting, registered users can also create their own subreddit on a topic of their choosing. The platform is divided into topics called “subreddits,” and your success depends on finding the right one for your content marketing needs. Reddit marketing doesn't have to be paid. Organically, companies can start promoting themselves by participating in the AMA (ask me anything) threads and other subreddits, giving their audience the space to leave reviews and ask questions. Yet, it seems that Reddit still isn’t a popular choice when it comes to social media strategy.
Blogging
Blogging networks allow you to publish your content for your audience and help them discover it. Blogging encourages users to publish topics about your company or services and link them to your website. These networks range from traditional blogging such as WordPress to microblogging platforms like Tumblr and interactive social publishing platforms as Medium.
Blogs are one of the pillars of social media, having full potential impact. While they increase visibility and generate leads, they need work and research more than any other social media platform.
Tumblr
Tumblr is one of the most popular blogging platforms, with over 425 million accounts. Tumblr is a microblogging platform. Unlike regular blogs, microblogs are made up of shorter posts, photos, or quotes. On Tumblr, users can post music, videos, GIFs, text, quotes, and links. Users can reblog those posts, or repost them on their own blogs, much like the share feature on Facebook.
Medium
Have you heard about Medium yet? Medium is a free social publishing platform that is home to a diverse array of stories, ideas, blogs, and perspectives. Medium is an amazing resource for content writers, being accessible for a wide range of users to publish their own thoughts and get insights from other content marketers. It is an appealing playground for adventurous marketers looking for new ways to associate their brand with great content.
WordPress
WordPress is open-source software for creating websites, blogs, and applications, used by individuals and big organisations. In fact WordPress powers over 35% of all websites on the internet. Marketers can build a whole SEO-optimised website in few simple clicks. Besides, there are thousands of plugins to choose from.WordPress does not only support blogs, but also, makes it easy for content writers to update and change them, schedule them into the future, and share these blog posts with your social media accounts and regular followers.
Final Thoughts
While there are many different marketing strategies, only one can guarantee consistent sales from day one; social media advertising. When target market aligns with the user demographics of a social media platform, social media advertising can maintain an effective increase in conversions and leads with lower cost.
Social Receptionist utilises the provided information, thanks to the unrivalled experience of its team, to deliver highly relevant advertisements based on the interactions within every social platform. Get in touch today to see how we can help your business grow sales and achieve the expected goals.
