Different social channels often have different functions and meet different goals. Some are suitable or popular for young people while others are too professional.
There are many benefits to marketing on social media, but it can be difficult to choose the right one among the many options. Finding the right channel that suits the right company can be challenging as some platforms fit certain audiences better than others.
A lot of companies usually run the shotgun setting as they try to be active on all platforms. This rarely succeeds. If you do not have a large marketing team behind your company then it is best to try to focus on a few individual social media.
Hopefully, through this overview, you can become a little wiser about which suits your business best, as we go through the pros and cons of marketing in a couple of the most popular social media outlets on the web at present.
In all likelihood your target audience is on Facebook considering its huge user base.
Benefits
- The majority of everyone who uses the internet is on Facebook.
- Works well with broad audiences
- Also works well to focus on more defined or niche target groups
- Many opportunities and variations to explore
- Flexible when it comes to goals (leads, sales, conversion, brand)
drawbacks - Younger people tend to use other social media
- Competition is high in some niches
- It can be difficult to get users involved
Contents
Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is an excellent social media platform for companies / people who want to expand and increase awareness of their brand
Benefits
- Good for brand building
- Best suited for visual products or services
- Good commitment as it is a “direct” as well as personal platform
- Relatively easy to reach new contacts with eg. hashtags
- You can advertise on Facebook and Instagram on the same platform
Drawbacks
- Difficult to generate leads because it is difficult to drive web traffic from Instagram, especially when not advertising
Snapchat
Snapchat started out as a fun application for messaging, but has now become incredibly popular with especially young people (18-34 years).
Benefits
- Suitable for products aimed at younger target groups
- Works well to show more of the company’s human side
Marketing on Snapchat is a sign that the company is up to date and aware of trends. - The chat feature makes users very engaged and active on the platform.
Drawbacks
- Especially younger people using the platform
Twitter focuses primarily on news and trendy topics that come and go.
Benefits
- Good for sharing opinions
- Many journalists using the platform
- Politicians are also active
- Tweets that make use of hashtags in a smart way can become quite as popular
Drawbacks
- Less user engagement
- Used irregularly by users
When it comes to career and professional life, Linkedin is the best social media.
Benefits
- Best B2B (business-to-business) platform
- Personal contact is easy to get
- Much focus on sales
- A lot of focus on recruitment
Drawbacks
- Not everyone is there or not as many users
- B2C (business-to-consumer) can be more difficult than other platforms
- The users are not as active
YouTube
YouTube is something that people globally use daily. YouTube is a bit of a gray zone as it is in many ways a social media while it is not. It is also so much more than a social media, such as the world’s second largest search engine for Google.
Benefits
- Only video content
- The world’s second largest search engine
- New and different business opportunities
- Easy to embed the movies on the blog / website
Drawbacks
- Only video content
Blog
Your blog or website where you regularly publish content is obviously not a social media platform, but it is still worth mentioning that platform in this list.
Benefits
- Full ownership of the channel, ie you are not dependent on the company that owns the platform.
- The content and visitors are closer to the product / service that you sell.
- For SEO (search engine optimization), your own blog is the clearest advantage.
Drawbacks
- It usually takes quite a while to see results
- You need to drive web traffic from other channels / sources.
Conclusion
Different platforms in the social media world can fulfill different functions as you have now learned. Most often, a company needs to try the many different approaches to find the ones that work best for their business, product and / or service.
