Best social media platform for business

Social media provides targeting capability, as well as reach and scale at a lower cost than almost all other marketing channels.

If you’re considering getting your business onto social media. However, it’s important to consider which platforms are right for your business and will provide the most value.

Not every social media platform is a good fit for every business. So you should invest your time and skills in the platforms where you’re most likely to reach and engage with your target audience. Each platform has a mission, purpose and unique audience.

Hence, here we will help you learn more about the different platforms.

What is social media?

Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.

Why use social media for business?

There are many reasons why you’d want to use social media for business. Here are a few of the top advantages:

1) Build Brand Awareness: Being active on social media helps you stand out and keeps your name on peoples’ minds throughout the day. After enough exposure, you’re bound to get more interested people checking out your brand’s content.

2) Connect With Customers: It’s a mistake to think that your business just needs to close the sale. Instead, social media opens the lines of communications between you and your customer base. This reduces your churn rate and leads to repeat customers in the future.

3) Boost Your SEO: By promoting your content on social media, you can get more likes, views, shares, and engagement. Then, you’ll drive more traffic to your site which boosts pageviews. These are all positive signs to search engines like Google, and these factors help improve your SEO.

4) Grow Your Mailing List: Once people get to your website from your social media content, you’ll have more opportunities to turn traffic into leads. Over time, you can use this traffic to grow your email list and generate even more revenue from your email campaigns.

5) Drive More Revenue: Each of the advantages listed above leads to one thing: leading customers down your sales funnel and generating more profit for your business.

How to use social media for business?

Here are some tips and best practices to help you be successful on social media.

1. Post consistently

You want your followers to know what to expect from you, so follow a consistent posting schedule. This will also help you avoid posting too much, which can be off-putting for your followers.

2. Have fun with it

Provide fun ways to generate more leads and engage with your customers, like running contests, linking to your website or special offers in your profile bio, and hosting live videos with exciting updates or news. You can also utilize Facebook or Instagram Shops to sell directly on social media platforms.

3. Know your audience

Use your analytics tools to see demographic information, customer behavior and social media trends to inform your content. Knowing what your audience wants to see from you and responding accordingly can go a long way in boosting your engagement rates.

4. Craft a social media marketing strategy

The best way to ensure success on social media is to go in with a plan. This means sitting down and coming up with a social media marketing strategy that includes each platform you plan to use.

Best social media platforms

1. Facebook

Facebook is the most popular social network in the world with more than two billion users. As a result, you can find just about anyone on Facebook, provided they have access to the Internet. That means almost everyone in your customer base has a Facebook account, which is why it’s a top social media site for businesses.

With such a broad appeal, Facebook gives you the chance to turn your customer base into a community. You can share behind-the-scenes looks at your company, new deals on your services, and more by creating a simple Facebook page. It only takes a few minutes to create, and once you upload some photos, you can start reaching out to Facebook users for followers.

Photos, contests, questions, videos, and other short posts work exceptionally well on Facebook. You can also use text updates to keep your followers informed, but they won’t perform as well as your photos or videos. And you can always use your Facebook to promote new content that you’ve created to get visitors to your site.

Bottom Line: Facebook is a tool that is right for just about any business. Though paid ads can become cumbersome and expensive, they’re totally optional. Your best bet is to have an active account to keep in touch and connect with users.

2. Instagram

Instagram is also incredibly popular, with around 1 billion active users in 2020. From Instagram Live to Instagram Stories, there is no shortage of tools businesses can use to promote their services and products on the site. Instagram is a visual platform based entirely on photo and video posts, so it’s best for businesses that have strong visual content to share.

It started out as a platform for sharing photos and still keeps that as its core use. However, it has expanded to videos in a feature called “stories.” Thus, Instagram has become an excellent way for brands to literally show (rather than tell) their products, values, and voice.

Moreover, Instagram is one of the youngest social networks out there, with a majority of users under 25. That makes it the perfect social network for brands or companies that target young, hip demographics. Photos and short videos with a small amount of text do exceptionally well on Instagram, and it also integrates with your Facebook and Twitter accounts so you can use the same photos across multiple platforms.

This platform tends to have a bigger following in urban areas, meaning companies that focus on fashion or digital tech will usually do better than companies focused on agriculture or home-building. Although that’s not to say you still can’t find success if you’re not a young, trendy company, just that you’ll have to be a little more creative with the photos you take.

Bottom Line: Instagram is great if your audience is younger and typically shopping from mobile. Plus, Instagram created a “Checkout” feature which means it’s fully set up for ecommerce. Now, your clients can look at product images and purchase what they like directly from their Instagram account.

3. Twitter

While Twitter is great for short updates, engaging with followers and sharing links to blog posts, it isn’t for every business. On Twitter, you can share short tweets (240 characters or fewer), videos, images, links, polls and more. It’s also easy to interact with your audience on this platform by mentioning users in your posts along with liking and retweeting tweets.

If you’re a highly visual business or you don’t have a strong brand voice, you may want to skip this social media network. However, many companies excel on Twitter, because they have a unique, on-brand voice on the platform that they use to their advantage. Other companies use this platform to handle customer service because customers who are also active on the platform will seek out companies to express concerns or share praise.

If you have interesting content and can voice that content in an engaging way, Twitter is a great tool for quickly spreading the word. Hashtags help boost posts, and if a user with a lot of followers retweets you, your content could go viral. But with Twitter, it’s important to find balance. Don’t just share your links or media; make sure you are also sharing a lot of interesting, relevant content from other Twitter users.

When it comes to using Twitter for business, you can definitely find ways to monetize the platform. Part of doing that is standing out from your competition, consistently engaging with your audience, and adding valuable content with all of your posts.

Bottom Line: Depending on your commitment to social media marketing, Twitter can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and connecting directly with other customers (not to mention other influencers). Keep in mind that Twitter needs its own marketing strategy, and you’ll need to plan for multiple tweets per day.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn was one of the first modern social media sites to really take hold and stick around. It’s become a networking tool exclusively for professionals and has revolutionized the way we seek, find, and get hired for jobs.It’s also a pretty good resource for sharing content.

In terms of professionalism, no social network can beat LinkedIn. It’s a thriving community of workers and business owners who share and connect on a professional level, making it much more formal than other social media platforms. Because of that, its users tend to respond better to B2B content than B2C.

While this certainly isn’t a hard and fast rule, people don’t typically go to LinkedIn for entertainment or online shopping. They go to learn more about their industry, see what their professional contacts are up to, and look for new career opportunities.

Bottom Line: LinkedIn is kind of like owning a pair of nice dress shoes: you’ll likely use them less often but you should really have them in your closet. While you can (and should) show off your brand with a LinkedIn business page, its core function is tailored to individual users and expanding your professional network.

5. YouTube

YouTube is kind of a catch-all when it comes to content since so many people use it (it’s the second-largest search engine in the world after Google). Comedy and music both do well on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use this social media platform for your business.

More than any of its competition (Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok), YouTube has become the platform for sharing information via video.It now boasts 2 billion monthly users and has become a place where people go not only for entertainment but to learn new things. And that’s what makes it such a powerful tool for businesses.

With YouTube, you can create a video channel and connect with your users in a totally different way than other social media platforms. You can create video tutorials to back up your text-based content (like blogs), visually show product descriptions, or give personal press releases to your viewers.

The key, however, is to make sure you are optimizing your videos for YouTube SEO so they actually get views. You may also want to consider finding ways to use YouTube to grow your email list.

Bottom Line: YouTube is a great social media platform for business in 2020 and beyond. It will likely take a little time upfront to learn how to shoot and edit videos that meet users’ expectations, but you don’t need a Hollywood budget. Most up-to-date smartphones are more than capable of recording high-quality videos. Just remember to optimize your titles and descriptions for YouTube SEO, and you’ll be well on your way to getting more traffic and conversions to your site.

6. Reddit

Reddit is an interesting breed when it comes to social media platforms. It’s more about genuine sharing and learning than it is about connecting and engaging. The reason is fairly straightforward: most Reddit groups have strict rules as to what you may or may not post for commercial purposes.

In fact, more often than not you’ll be removed from a group if you’re using a forum to blatantly self-advertise. That said, a lot of companies have found massive success by engaging on Reddit. All it takes is a little creativity, lots of interaction, and a genuine desire to teach and/or learn.

The key to Reddit is authenticity. If your product is “spammy,” the natives will lead a-revolt and your brand credibility will take a hit.  Following many popular social advertising platforms with the ability to target by interest, Reddit allows for a conversational tone to the content promoted.  With its latest rollout or Reddit CPC ads, this is a great platform to start utilizing. While it won’t be a major driver in terms of sales, brands can no longer afford to pass up the opportunity for potential users to get to know their offerings on a deeper level.

Bottom Line: Reddit is a great social media platform for your business if you primarily use it for personal purposes. Because users can go through your posting history, they’ll likely investigate whether or not you are genuinely contributing to a community or if you are just there to attract visitors to your website.

7. Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the top social media platforms for small businesses. It’s gone from a mere 10,000 users to 291 million active users today. This visually oriented platform allows users to save and display content by “pinning” digital bulletin boards, which can be organized by category. 

For example, a personal user might have a food board dedicated to pinning recipes, another board dedicated to photography, and so on. The platform also has a series of special types of pins called Rich Pins, which brands can use to add specific information to their pins, like product details and location maps. Every pin on Pinterest includes an image or video, making it a purely visual platform. As such, Pinterest is not the place for you to share information like your business hours

Furthermore, pinterest is great for niche businesses, but it may not be for every company. Popular categories on the site are DIY projects, fashion, exercise, beauty, photography and food. That’s not to say that businesses outside of these categories can’t succeed on the platform, but it does make Pinterest an especially good marketing tool for businesses in those areas.

Bottom Line: Pinterest can be a great traffic driver to your site, but it’s better suited for some businesses than others. Home decor, cooking recipes, photography sites, and travel are all examples of businesses that can thrive on Pinterest.

8. Quora

When most people think of the best social media platforms for business, Quora isn’t one that comes directly to mind. But maybe it should. Quora is a good way for you to look for questions in your professional field, establish yourself as an authority, and link to content you’ve written on the topics being discussed.

But be warned, just like Reddit, moderators are good at discerning between genuine contribution to a question and blatant self-advertising. The most successful responses are those that focus on the question rather than on your own business.

Bottom Line: There’s almost no reason not to try out Quora for a couple of months. Once you make an account, start searching for questions in your field that don’t have too many responses so they are more likely to be upvoted.

Wrap up

These best social media platforms for business will help you drive more sales and ROIs. Regardless of the platform, as long as the brand has the ability to target its audience properly – and throw in robust video or ecommerce ability – the potential for brand growth is there for the taking.

And, remember, the list above is not exhaustive. There are still other channels like Tumblr, Tik Tok, and snapchat. But if you’re just getting started, the list provided above is a great place to start.