We all have an access to the digital world today. From our personal sphere to the professional workspace, almost everything can be easily conducted in the digital platform.
From a business perspective, you can think of it as a tool that has multiple functioning capability, designed to achieve your desired marketing goals. There are many platforms for you to choose from and every platform is unique with its working dynamics. Therefore, whether you’re starting as a small scale venture or with a large scale budget it is desirable for you to evaluate the existing platforms before engaging with them.
Social media marketing has come a long way from publishing content to running highly-targeted business advertising campaigns. A large number of businesses are moving away from offline marketing to online due its unstable nature. No business wants to incur losses that could have been avoided in the first place. The future cannot be predicted but you can try and resort to ways that will ensure you positive growth.
Why is it important to evaluate the emerging social media platforms before marketing your business?
With a growing usage of social media platforms, it will enable you to connect your business with millions and millions of people. Globally, more than half of the world’s population is already using social media. It is the place to be in 2024 with more than 4.5 billion of active users present on the platforms.
Other than a great connectivity social media offers you to take in-depth insights about your targeted market base. But here is a catch!
All social media platforms comprehensively performs a multitude of functions. But every platform has certain specialized features that will help you attain certain specific objectives. There are certain goals that are common to all businesses like, customer engagement and brand awareness. And then, there are specific goals, goals that are unique to your business. For instance, Instagram is the best place to be if you are looking for Influencer marketing. If your business is for women, Pinterest would be a suitable platform.
But don’t go rushing in it!
Before you decide in which platforms you want to set up your marketing campaign, we suggest you to understand your specific goals first. You need to keep that in mind and then decide the most suitable platform that will exclusively help you to achieve your objectives.
Social media platforms are not limited to a few options. Every week a new platform is brought out in the public forum and there’s ample to choose from. Great, right? But wait…
Take a pause before you move to the next section. Now ask yourself – what is more benefitting to you, to invest in a start- up platform or in one of the popular social networking sites? What difference will it make?
Popular social media platforms will not only help you to increase your sales and conversions but primarily align your objectives with the demographics of that social network. Thereby organically extending your business reach.
With truckload of information/s available about the top running platforms, I have evenly covered all that you will need to know about the top social media marketing platforms used by an increased number of consumers and businesses – Facebook, Instagram. LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest.
Before choosing any of the above social media market, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Demography of target customers – who are they? Usage rate, preferred media, active engagement on sites and the kind of content they consume.
- Cost benefit – more returns with minimal expenditure
- Already established businesses
- Comparative revenue forecasts for each platform
- The degree of brand awareness created by each platform
Facebook
It is tagged as the universal social media platform allowing every kind of content to be produced- videos, images, lives and stories. As a new business, it will provide you with an unparalleled opportunity to direct varied contents to a highly dissected audience. One of the first social media platform to enable business advertising to a rising boon. Widely used for review surveys, advertising and customer support. If this is what your business is about, look no other way! Email marketing is on a rise and if your consumers love interact with you through personal emails, Facebook is the space for you.
You will not believe if I tell you that you can have a target audience within a 5 mile radius of you. One of the reasons why more and more advertisers are placing safe bets when it comes to Facebook marketing. Today, already 65 million businesses have established their market in Facebook through very little investment in lead generation. Leads are promotional tools, like giveaways and free deliveries that helps you to attract your audience much more. Facebook costs you as cheap as $1 per lead for an advertising campaign.
According to CFO/CCO of Spearmint Love, a baby clothing company of Arizona says that after being in business for three years with a sound marketing base, they took a leap to looked forward to earning in a short time span, so they turned to Facebook which acted as complete game changer by growing 1110% in a span of 365 days, entirely through Facebook marketing.
Instagram
Is your audience more photo savvy? Are they interested in visual contents? Do they consume more of visual media and less of text graphics?
Instagram serves as a best marketing tool for B2C and B2B companies. If you are a B2C company, you can use Instagram infinitely to shares posts, update stories and reposts. You can ask your followers to help sharing your ads and posts on their feed. If you are a B2B company sharing sneak peeks of your offline business environment can generate a lot of traffic in your account. People love to consume personal contents and behind the scenes shoots. This is the most convenient space where the audience engagement rate is even higher than that of Facebook by 58%percent. Compared to twitter the figure is even higher at 2000%.
If your business serves particularly the age group of 18-29 years through visual media, this is the platform you have been looking for! The population base of Instagram is more of the younger audience.
Adobe has used Instagram very effectively using vibrant images and videos to attract a wider follower base. It has run various kinds of campaigns through use of popular hashtags. It hosts monthly campaigns too to ensure higher audience interactivity. Today, adobe has about more than 968K followers and with every post it is continually generating higher levels of engagement.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is not like the other two social media platforms. At present it has 562million registered users. More than half of its users are in the 30-64 years age group. It started as job search site. Wherein users used it to submit resumes and CVs for jobs. The platform is best suited for B2B businesses expand your network through B2B networking. A great avenue to connect with like-minded people and organizations. If you compare LinkedIn to Facebook, for instance, it has tremendous ability to target wider audience. Its will help you to earn a name through professional brand recommendations which can be incredibly profitable for your businesses.
Baume and Mercier, a watch making Swiss company, in operation for more than 180 years used LinkedIn channel to grow their audience by invitation of young professionals to celebrate their local success campaigns. The response rate went extensively through 50% and click rates roofed through five folds.
Pinterest
It is one of the fastest growing platform ideal for women and retail market.
Today it is a budding platform for all kind of businesses, Pinterest gives you a space to create good brand personality. From showcasing of products and eye catching unique pin boards and a platform to discover new things and get inspired. If you love to create new and innovative things and will inspire people, visit Pinterest now!
Influencer marketing is a growing phenomenon wherein you collaborate with top influencers to gain access to a wider audience. Pinterest gives you the ability to inspire people with their need based product creations. The platform keeps itself well updated with the emerging trends and tries to incorporate them into their product and services.
One success story is that of Native Union, a cell phone Accessories Company used Pinterest to post exclusive lifestyle images for modern homes which earned them a wholesale placement in Paper Source due to the platform’s audience being highly women targeted.
Twitter
Everybody wants to be updated to all the latest news and events being covered worldwide. In our fast paced life, when everything happens in a go, twitter is the place for you to build a strong brand presence. It allows you to broadcast live updates and keep your viewers up-to-date with daily notifications. The interaction is more prompt and pronounced.
If you are looking forward to live interactions and keep your audience updated to your daily life updates, Twitter seems to be the right place for you. It has 320million active users on a monthly basis. It will help you to broadcast your messages and updates in real time.
One of the leading success story of Twitter marketing campaign is Starbucks. Starbucks faced a lot of backlash when they introduced their red cups designed for Christmas. They didn’t fall back but went ahead to embrace the situation. They used twitter to post innumerable pictures of the cup in different forms. They maintained their interaction with the audience constantly through retweeting their follower’s posts and interacting with them. It extended their reach to wider audience and helped them to talk through the difficult situation.
Before you start out to in the world of marketing campaigns state your goals and objectives. Then try to figure out your audience base. Who they are and where are they. Start with a limited target audience. After you have grasped a good control, you can reach out to a wider audience. Social media can be used for infinite possibilities to create a long lasting brand image in the minds of users. It only becomes a lot easier to do when you can collect yourself to be in the right platform. It will help to enrich your connectivity and develop a friendlier relationship between you and your audience.
