Which of the Social Media Platforms is Important for Marketing?

Marketing has evolved greatly over the past few years. With the rapid increase in the number of internet users, 59% of the entire world population is now a member of the online world. Understandably, traditional marketers, too, have shifted to digital marketing.

Digital marketing is a form of marketing that is done through search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. All these mediums are used to sell a product or service, increase brand visibility, and uplift the overall brand value.

Social media marketing has gradually become the most important channel for businesses to market their products and services. But your business type drives the decision as to which social media marketing would work for you.

To define what social media works for your business marketing, let's explore some widely known social media platforms and their marketing tactics.

1. Facebook

Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. With a wide variety of audiences available on the forum, more than 180 million-plus businesses have been using Facebook to grow their brand and increase revenue.

Facebook is a social media platform where users can post status updates, photos, and videos to interact with other users. This social media platform is essentially used by people to connect with friends and family and to discover ideas and thoughts about what matters to them.

Facebook marketing is a platform that offers an array of strikingly targeted paid advertisements and organic posts that allow brands to present their products and services to a varied audience. To market your brand on the platform, you need to sign up as a business on Facebook and create a page for your brand. The website asks for a few details like the email id and phone number, both of which are verified through a one-time password (OTP). After you set up a password for the account, you can access your business page by logging in by entering your credentials.

A business page helps users search, find, and interact with your business. To strengthen your presence on the platform, you can add a profile picture and cover photo to your business page. Further details such as business name, website, location, active hours, and business category can be added. Similar to a normal profile, a business account user, too, can post status updates, pictures, videos, and check-ins.

Facebook provides several tools to help businesses make the most of the platform. These are called "Resources and Tools" and can be accessed from your business account settings. You can use a funding option that is offered as an emergency economic relief to help businesses move forward. Under business tools, you can find an alternative to sell gift cards online and on Facebook with one of their available partners. You can even post deals and discounts directly from your account and create a new offer for your customers that will land directly on their Facebook newsfeed once they like and follow your business page.

You can promote any post from your profile so that the audience whose interests might be similar to your brand can come across your post and profile, which will increase engagement and drive sales.

Facebook marketing is recommended to those businesses whose customers are generic, diverse, casual, and moderate to highly active on social media. It works well for local businesses striving to cash on the global markets.

2. Twitter

As a powerful platform for one of the most formal conversations encircling the biggest names of worldwide governments and businesses, Twitter is a defining social media marketing option for those who like to keep it simple and sharp. With 320 Million plus monthly active users, Twitter is a promising platform for small and medium businesses to create awareness about their brand and reach out to their potential customers and successfully convert them into happy clients.

To begin, create a business account on Twitter using an email and a password. Next, set up your business profile by adding a profile picture and a header image. Usually, businesses use their brand logo as the profile picture, which stays the same across all social media platforms and helps users identify their genuine accounts. Then, add an account name or "handle" that will appear as the name when you tweet or when people search for your business.

After that, add a bio to your profile. A bio is like an introductory message to your profile visitors, that too in under 160 characters. You should include your brand's website URL, your location, and the working hours of your business in your profile bio. A good practice is to include a tracking link with the website URL to track visitors who have landed on the website through Twitter.

To achieve marketing goals, you can run a paid ad campaign for your brand. With Twitter ads, you can reach exactly the right audience and specific users interested in your brand domain. It can help create awareness about your brand, increase engagement with your profile and the website, and even push them towards a CTA (call to action).

Goals such as Website clicks, video views, app installs can be achieved through Twitter marketing.

3. Pinterest

The most visually appealing social media platform of them all, Pinterest is an image-centric platform that enables users to share and save information in pictures, videos, and GIFs. Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing marketing trends. Pinterest is ideal for retail, fashion, culinary, home-décor, styling, art, and hobbies, and many other creative domains that can be used aptly by businesses for self-driving ads. It acts as a visual search engine to look for inspiration from a catalogue of ideas.

To make the most of this creative social media platform, make sure to sign-up as a business on Pinterest, which will allow you to access business specific resources like analytics, rich pins, and more. For retail owners, Pinterest acts as a virtual storefront by providing brand catalogues from which to choose. When your business shares an image, a "pin" is clicked on by a user; it provides them with the details around that picture. On a second click on the expanded pin, it redirects to any website that the business has linked with that pin.

Pinterest users are mostly middle-aged women, so if you're looking to entice that demographic, this is the right social media marketing plan for you.

4. Instagram

A social media platform that began as an image sharing heaven for photographers and travellers has now upgraded into one of the most powerful social media platforms for marketing. People who use Instagram are already aware of their vast business interaction potential and therefore never shy away from interacting with brands over the platform. That is why a plethora of brands have already used Instagram ads to enhance their business engagement.

After setting up a business page on Instagram, you get access to various tools and resources that have been designed specifically for businesses to progress through this platform. With every picture or video post, a business page can view how it's performing with the help of "insights." Insights help businesses understand their audience's likes and dislikes and how each of their posts is accepted among the audience.

You can create story ads, photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, and even ads in the explore section. To buy an ad, you can use the official Instagram app or use the Ads Manager on Facebook, and select a target audience based on their location, demographics, interests, and behaviour. With shop-able Instagram posts, IGTVs, and now reels, this platform is the best to target youth and tech-friendly audiences.

Each social media platform varies from another in terms of its users, reach, domain, and format. People tend to use those social media platforms that align with their range of interests and which help them achieve their online goal; be it communication with friends and family, the inspiration for hobbies and art, curiosity about well-known figures, keeping up-to-date with current affairs, or expressing emotions about a brand product or service.

Also read:

1) What Is The Most Popular Social Media In 2020?
2) Why Storytelling Is Important In Business Marketing?
3) The Future of the Internet in India
4) Top-10 Things & Technologies that will be trending in the year 2021

FAQs

Q. Which social media platforms can be used for marketing?

Ans: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest are some of the social media platforms with the highest number of users; hence they are suitable for marketing.

Q. I do not want to spend on ads; can I still market my brand online?

Ans: Yes, most social media platforms provide various free resources and tools to business accounts to help them with brand marketing.

Q. How do I decide which platform to use for marketing?

Ans: Consider your brand's marketing goals and choose the platform that fulfils your criteria of customer demographics, interests, and target audience's buyer persona.