Every business needs a social media presence in the present times. Social media platforms are essential tools in a modern digital marketer’s toolbox. If you see the benefits of using social media to promote your brand, there are many. Social media integrates with SEO, supports your website, expands your reach, and builds a community around your company.

In simple words, social media can change a lot about your brand’s goodwill and how well you’re perceived by the audience. Every small and high-end brand has chosen social media platforms to widen its reach and outshine the competition. But all of this is only possible when you choose the correct social media platform for your business.

However, many companies can’t be everywhere at once, and they have to choose a platform due to their tight marketing budgets or some other reasons. You must be thinking about how to choose any one platform when you have many popular alternatives like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.? The key to choosing a perfect social media platform in your digital marketing strategy is identifying the personalities of the audience and your brand and choosing an adequate platform to get them together.

Before you dive into the insights of choosing the right social media, many people have a conception that a particular social media would be just right for their business and the other completely inadequate. Firstly, let’s see if there’s something like a right or wrong social media for your business?

In simple words, the answer is No. There’s no right social media platform for your business, and you can promote it wherever you want. Just make sure you understand your brand, audience, and whether the chosen social media platform fits your digital marketing strategy.

This post is aimed to walk you through the various social media alternatives you can choose to build your presence on. Also, you’ll see which social media platform is suitable for what kinds of business marketing.

Consider the following things while choosing the right social media channels for your business among the different social media platforms.

Where is your audience?

The first thing you should find out and critically important is which social media platform your niche audience uses? It’s crucial because there’s no sense in putting efforts on a network if your target audience isn’t using it. For this, define your target audience and verify it against the social media demographics.

Let’s understand this deeply. If your target audience is people in the age group of 45 -60, Instagram may not be the best place to channel your efforts. In this case, you can do better with Facebook or Pinterest. Additional to this, explore how your competitors are using the particular social media platform you’re interested in and whether it’s really working for them. You can go through the content posted and the engagement on their account. If content related to your niche industry seems to resonate well, it’s a good indicator, and you can go for it.

Another crucial thing to remember while choosing a social media platform is – don’t choose social media networks based on what’s newest; instead, go for something that’s already popular among your audience.

What is your niche industry?

It’s important to understand that not every social media will work for your industry. Let’s take an example – visually-driven industries like beauty and fashion, apparel and clothing, and the food industry work well with Instagram and Facebook as users can relate to images and videos more than plain text. Moreover, industries like tech and software have experienced a lot of success with Twitter.

Again, as it’s mentioned above, to determine which social media suits your industry, look at your competitor’s social media strategy. To ensure you’re making the right decision, you can see if your competitor brands are active on the concerned social media and whether they’re getting engagement. Social media engagement is crucial for marketing as it shows there’s an audience who is actively interested in your brand.

Below is a guide to the major social media platforms you can market your brand on.

  1. Facebook

    Facebook has been many marketers’ favourite social media platform due to its reach among every age group. Not only this, according to statistics, half of the Facebook users visit the site several times a day. This means your audience would be able to see your content many times a day.

    Facebook has by far every type of user, from different age groups, income groups, and countries. If your brand is international, Facebook could prove to be the best option. Now many people think only millennials use Facebook, and the brands that have professionals as the target audience cannot market on Facebook. That’s not true. In fact, the data says, many people who have college degrees and making thousands of dollars a year also have Facebook accounts.

    With this, it’s clear that Facebook is always a worthwhile investment for your company, no matter what your target audience is.

    In addition to the fact that Facebook allows your brand to connect with a huge number of people from diverse backgrounds, it also offers a few unique features for your marketing.

    One of the best features you can get for your business is the targeted digital advertising platform Facebook offers. With Facebook ads, you can set a target group and market your brand to those who are more likely to purchase your products or avail of your services. This feature makes sure that both your money and efforts are not getting wasted and you’re advertising in front of the right users at the right time.

    Another unique feature Facebook offers is the opportunity for brands to connect with customers through Facebook messenger. But in order to gain success in Facebook marketing, one has to gain a significant number of Facebook followers.

    In simple words, Facebook is a platform that is optimal for many brands and industries. Your best bet is to have an active account to keep in touch and connect with users. If you have the budget and time, you can look into exploring Facebook ads as well.

  2. Instagram

    Instagram has proved to one of the fastest-growing platforms, especially among the young audience. Within two months of its launch in 2010, Instagram marked over a million users. As mentioned earlier in the article, Instagram relies on images for conversation; hence, it is best suitable for visually-driven businesses like food, art, retail, beauty, etc.

    Before selecting Instagram as your social media platform for promoting business, make sure you consider the demographics. If you are targeting a young demographic, Instagram is the best fit for your digital marketing strategy. It’s because 72% of all the teenagers use Instagram and the ratio of adults or those coming in the age group of 40-60 is very less.

    So, if your target audience is teenagers or young adults, Instagram could be the best option. But there’s a catch. People scroll Instagram for hours without even having a reason to do so; hence, you have to be very engaging and unique to capture the attention of users.

    Instagram can provide some distinct features for your business. You can make the most out of this platform by telling your brand’s story with engaging visual content. No matter what’s your brand is all about, you can promote your content in an appealing visual manner. There’s just a drawback that Instagram may not have the most professional target audience for specific industries like software companies, information technology, etc.

    Another unique feature Instagram provides is the Instagram story. Here, you can post live videos, short videos, and important news and updates. Insta stories are great to connect to the audience as you can share what goes on behind the scene in your workplace and about your working environment. This way, your audience feels more connected to your brand.

    If all of these features seem beneficial to you, Instagram may be the ideal social media platform for you. Also, as mentioned above, Instagram is a great platform, but only if you have a great follower count. After all, your efforts are only worthwhile when there is someone to acknowledge it. To gain followers, you can try organic methods, but if you want an instant boost and a base to start with, you can even buy Instagram followers. Not only followers, but some brands also buy Instagram likes, Instagram comments as a part of their marketing strategy.

  3. Twitter

    Twitter is an excellent platform to build the social media presence of your brand. Brands, celebrities, journalists, sportsperson, and even Presidents use Twitter to share news, stories, articles, or any content on a daily basis.

    Twitter has a very distinct feature; it limits the word limit of your tweet to just 280 characters, giving you a chance to craft a meaningful, sharp, and engaging message rather than exaggeration. And because there’s a word limit, brands become extra cautious and creative with what they have to post.

    In terms of age, Twitter has users in the age group of 18-30. Users lying under the age group of 30-50 are less limiting to 26 %. So, if your target audience is teenagers or young adults, twitter is a great option. But unfortunately, it doesn’t rank high in terms of education and income as you won’t find extremely professional people using Twitter much.

    You can still make the most out of Twitter by participating in the hashtag trends. Hashtags allow you to start a conversation about all the trending topics of your industry. Also, hashtags allow you to reach more users who might be interested in your content.

    Just like Facebook, brands can also deliver ads to their target audience on Twitter. Twitter has several options for ad formats, and you can select any depending on your strategies and goals. Just make sure you build a following first and then move forward with your marketing strategy.

  4. LinkedIn

    LinkedIn is the best social media platform for professionals. The platform started as a business and employment-based social media platform. Though LinkedIn is a smaller platform as compared to Facebook and Instagram, it is full of professionals across a wide spectrum of industries. Not only this, LinkedIn is the second most popular social media platform for B2B.

    LinkedIn is unique due to its narrow focus and limited reach. People don’t visit LinkedIn for entertainment purposes or shopping; they visit LinkedIn to search for jobs and network professionally. As a result, the platform is useful for recruiting employees, B2B lead generation, as well as general networking.

    Unlike Facebook and Instagram, your content is more likely to reach its target audience through LinkedIn. This happens because both Facebook and Instagram are crowded with various content and depend on algorithms that decide whether or not your content will be shown to the audience. That sounds crazy! But at LinkedIn, you won’t find any cat or dog videos, but content purely dedicated to raising a company’s profile and connecting with other brands and efforts geared towards recruitment.

    Though, it isn’t as easy as it seems. There’s no guarantee that Users would see your content as soon as they follow you, but at LinkedIn, chances are more than Facebook or any other giant social media platform.

    Now, talking about the demographics, LinkedIn is mostly used by professionals in the age-group of 30-50 years. Moreover, some part also consists of adults lying in the age group of 22-29.

    LinkedIn also provides digital ads opportunities like Facebook, but the digital ads on LinkedIn may cost you more than Facebook. The platform also has groups that anyone can join based on their job function, career interests, industry.

    To simplify this, if you want to target a business-minded or professional audience, LinkedIn is where you should channel your efforts.

  5. Pinterest

    Pinterest is another excellent social media platform having search engine capabilities. People usually use Pinterest to find helpful content or often inspiration. Majorly, people use Pinterest for home décor, fashion ideas, food, and, very importantly, shopping.

    There’s an interesting fact here, most of the Pinterest users are women. In fact, there is three times more woman than men on Pinterest. This should be it if your business is about home décor, lifestyle, gadgets and home appliances, beauty and fashion, etc. When it comes to purchasing decisions about all of the mentioned things, women usually are the predominant decision-makers.

    Another noteworthy point, since Pinterest is a visual-based platform, you’ll need strong graphics to engage users.

    Pinterest gives the opportunity to the brands to directly sell their products through the platform. Using Pinterest Buy Button, users can buy products directly from the brand’s Pinterest page. Also, users can search for a specific product and add it to their shopping bags. This distinct feature makes Pinterest a fantastic tool for brands to increase their sales and enhance online visibility.

    To summarize, Pinterest is a great platform to boost sales and market a brand, but it’s better suited to some specific brands than others. Lifestyle influencers, beauty brands, DIY crafts, home décor, photography sites are a few examples of businesses that can thrive on Pinterest.

  6. YouTube

    Who doesn’t know about YouTube? YouTube is the second largest search engine and the best social media platform that exists. This brings YouTube above Instagram and very close to Facebook in terms of usage. With YouTube, you can reach a wider audience and people who might be searching for you.

    Another fact why you should choose YouTube as your platform is because videos are the preferred media format nowadays, and people tend to understand more with explained videos rather than plain text. That’s why nothing could possibly go wrong with YouTube. The only thing that might bother you is that it takes a ton of effort and strategies to get it working with YouTube.

    Also, YouTube could be quite expensive than any other social media platform as you have to produce videos to upload.

    In terms of statistics, brands having a broad target audience might have an advantage because people of all ages use YouTube. Even those above the age of 65 use YouTube to get information.

    YouTube is an affordable way for brands having a marketing budget to publish video content. With YouTube, you can also drive more traffic to your website and e-commerce site.

    With YouTube, you not only can reach a wider audience but can also improve your Search Engine Rankings. And the best part, Youtube is suitable for almost every kind of brand and business. Just make sure your content is optimized, and you abide by all the ranking factors.

At a Glance

If you’re just starting your digital marketing, it could be hard to decide which social media platform should be your focus. It’s best to start slow and shortlist the top two or three networks you find suitable. After this, once you have built following on a platform, go for other options also.

As you start to succeed, expanding to other platforms will become easier once you have a loyal following. There are many ways to gain a loyal and organic following, and if you want to gain an instant following, you can use paid services to buy Instagram followers, Instagram likes, Instagram comments, YouTube subscribers, YouTube comments, etc.

This guide will prove helpful in picking the best social media platform for your business. Remember, it’s all about how you present your brand’s personality. It’s really possible to gain success on a completely unexpected platform if you’re tuned into the preferences and tastes of your audience.