Business owners are overly busy ensuring everything around their business runs smoothly. This can lead to entrepreneurs lacking the time to take care of and nurture their online, more precisely, social presence. And often, they make drastic changes to find the time for proper community development on these social platforms.
Back in the day, businesses wanted to cover every ground and be visible on every social media outlet. This is still a great strategy today, however, in some cases, a business might benefit more from using only a few channels and creating dedicated content for those platforms to maximize its exposure and branding potential.
Still, the question begs to be answered: which is the best social media for business? Our team of experts at Rosy Strategies will give you all the answers you need below.
The Case for Narrowing Down The Number of Social Media Platforms for Businesses
It might seem counterintuitive, but focusing your community development efforts only on a few dedicated social channels can be a massive advantage if you plan everything out properly. Concentrating on only a few social media platforms (or even just one) can help you save a considerable amount of time for starters. And that’s not all. Using the right social media platform for your business can help you find the right target audience, the correct type of social content that engages them, and the advertising strategies that will yield the best results and do your brand justice.
Still, you shouldn’t forget that the best social media platform for one business might not work for the other. To make the right choice, you need to sit down, do your research, and answer the following questions using the data you’ve gathered.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
This is probably one of the most crucial steps that you’ll make. The fact of the matter is that not all users are tech-savvy to the extent that they are present on all platforms. Others simply prefer one outlet over another. You need to be specific about whose attention you want to grab and what social channel they are using.
As such, your job is to assess the following precisely:
- Who is your typical buyer?
- Which generation do they belong to?
- Are they female or male?
- What is their income level?
- How educated are they?
- What are their interests aside from your services/products?
You might only get data-backed answers for some of these questions, but try giving as specific answers as possible. If nothing else, you can always revert to your buyer persona and go from there.
What Are Your Goals?
Finding the best social media for your business also entails defining your goals for your previously determined target audience. Naturally, your primary goal will most likely be driving more sales through social advertising. Still, in reality, there are several other creative goals that you can pursue on social media platforms. These websites are great tools for increasing brand awareness, recognition, and equality; they can be excellent incubators to nurture and help your community development efforts. Social platforms may also be used as engagement endpoints and customer support channels.
Using these alternatives can help you free up your phone lines and give your customers a more convenient environment to solve customer service issues. At the same time, this allows entrepreneurs to promote their brands on selected social channels.
To find the best social media outlet for your business, make a list of the most prominent and less obvious goals to see how social media can help you achieve them. This will automatically narrow down your choices of available platforms and make the decision easier.
Find Your Audience
The best social media platform for your business is where your profiled audience is, simple as that. Still, to find this group of people, you will need to research user demographics on each of these web applications.
Second, you will also need to consider how active your audience is on each platform. It’s a known fact that young users have Facebook profiles, but they are mostly inactive on the platform, preferring TikTok or Instagram instead.
Also, you will want to know how these people use these channels, which can further help you assess which one you should use as well.
To help you out, here are the largest social platforms, along with some vital info about them:
With a user base of over 2.7 billion people, Facebook is the largest social media platform in existence. Still, when considering which social media platform is the best for your business, you should know that users mainly visit Facebook to keep in contact with their friends and potentially build new relationships. This might not make Facebook the best option for driving more business and potential sales, but it can help you build brand loyalty among your existing customers. Also, because of the massive user base, ads and posts might have limited reach.
As such, it’s one of the best social media platforms if you seek to stay in touch with your customers and a great way to encourage your brand ambassadors to keep promoting your services/products.
Instagram is still one of the fastest-growing social apps on the market, being especially popular among younger audiences. This visual- and video-heavy platform uses imagery as the primary means of conversation, making it an excellent choice for those businesses that are also visual-based. Food, beauty, retail, and art companies can express their creative individuality and create a massive social presence with a broader reach that’s better for lead generation.
Twitter can be the best social media for your business if you want to increase brand awareness. Like Instagram, it houses hashtags that help organize posts, organically helping you gain more potential followers and customers searching the topics you tweet about.
On the other hand, Twitter is all about news and trends, and it’s often used to give users real-time updates about events and other trending things; it can be an excellent platform for those brands who seek to boost offline engagement.
YouTube
With a registered user base of over 2 billion, this social media platform is also a significant player in the social game. Consider that you don’t even have to create an account to view videos on the web app, and you have a social giant that’s also a massive search engine platform. As such, it’s the go-to platform for service companies or those who sell lifestyle products and make educational videos.
Primarily used for professional networking and finding jobs, LinkedIn might be the preferred social media platform for doing business if you want to improve B2B lead generation, recruit employees, or improve your networking efforts in your professional community.
TikTok
The go-to platform for short-form video content, TikTok is also a visual-heavy platform that can ensure visual-based businesses an excellent cradle to build brand awareness, especially among younger audiences, particularly the 18–24 age group.
Get the Most Out of Social Media
Limiting your business to one or two social channels can be a great way to focus more on specific aspects of marketing and brand development. Still, it’s understandable if you want to use every social channel and create platform-specific strategies for each, maximizing your social presence.
If that’s on your mind, feel free to contact us to help you with the task. As a leading social media agency in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, FL, we know what it takes to maximize a brand’s potential on each platform.