Popular Social Media Channels for your Business (Explained)

There are a lot of options when it comes to choosing the right social media platform to use for your inbound marketing efforts. To help you decide which channels are the best fit for your social strategy, let's walk through the basics and benefits of each of them. Let's start with the giant Facebook. You may have heard the adage that if Facebook were a country, it would be the largest on earth. That's because it currently boasts over 2 billion users, far more than the largest country, China, which has 1.44 billion people living within its borders. It's likely that the majority of people you know are on the social platform. And even more important for your business, it's not just for personal use anymore. According to the Pew Research center, more than 67% of Americans are using Facebook as their primary source of news. Millions of companies use Facebook Business Pages to share organic news events, talk to customers, and manage highly targeted advertising campaigns. This means that Facebook is potentially going to be one of the most important platforms for your social media strategy. There are two types of Facebook, a Personal Page and a Business Page. You might have heard that organic reach is better on a Personal page, which is true, but there are several reasons you should use a Facebook Business Page for your company instead. First off, Facebook requires businesses to use Business Pages and can shut down pages that do not comply with their policy. Personal Pages have a 5000 person friend limit, whereas Business Pages can have millions of followers. Having a Business Page also gives you access to analytics, they call them insights, and the ability to correctly categorize your company for search, to add a mission statement, add a product catalog, awards, and give your customers the chance to give reviews. But the most important reason for you to have a Facebook Business Page is is for advertising. Facebook advertising allows you to hyper target the audiences you care most about, including your own prospect lists. You can directly deliver content of value with those lists. You can also use Facebook advertising across their other services Instagram, Facebook messenger, and WhatsApp. Adding a Facebook pixel on your website even helps you retarget those visitors with ads on Facebook. On Facebook, you can publish a variety of content, including text and photo posts, carousel photo posts, and video posts. You can even do live Facebook videos and share stories micro content designed to disappear after 24 hours, similar to Snapchat and Instagram stories. With over 1.3 billion users, YouTube is the second largest social network and interestingly enough, it's also the second largest search engine in the world behind Google. Of course, to give you a sense of its importance, more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. It's almost mind boggling to think about. Google reports that 6 out of 10 people prefer online video platforms to live TV, which means in many ways you have the potential to reach an even bigger audience for a more affordable cost than on television. On mobile, YouTube reaches more 18 to 49 year olds in the US than any other cable network. When it comes to marketing on the platform, YouTube offers a variety of interesting possibilities. Remember how I mentioned it was the second largest search engine? That means it not only helps with SEO, but YouTube has some of the highest referral rates of all the social platforms. Also important, the platform has high conversion rates when it comes to paid advertising. If you offer a complex product or service, having great videos can help sway prospects into a purchase. Creating video isn't always easy or free, but the benefits and the statistics far outweigh the cost of not participating at all. So what can you do on YouTube? Not only can you host original content and have channel subscribers, it's also a great place to syndicate content and to consider advertising, including interstitial advertising, which are short clips that appear before a video. Approximately 20% of the people who start your video are going to leave after the first 10 seconds, which is all the more reason to consider allocating resources to creating great content. I mentioned Instagram already, but let's give it a longer look. It's owned by Facebook, but the audiences and purposes are a bit different. It's the third largest social media platform and it's the fastest growing. Instagram is a photo and video based social network and users follow individuals and brands to be delighted by interesting visuals. Instagram is a younger network with 90% of its audience under the age of 35, but even that is shifting as more and more individuals adopt the platform. While the primary functionality is sharing photos and videos, there's another feature rising in popularity. Like the Snapchat platform, Instagram stories enable the sharing of quick, easy, instant photos and videos, often with fun filters and visual features. Stories disappear after 24 hours for viewers, but remain stored in an archive for you to see and repost again. You'll want to convert a personal Instagram account to an Instagram business profile to include a phone number, an address in your bio, and to enable the Shop button. And to do that, you're required to have a Facebook business page, which you'll also need to take advantage of advertising on this channel. Instagram is important because it has very deep engagement, especially for brands over 80% of users follow at least one brand account. Forrester tells us that engagement with brands on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and 84 times higher than Twitter. That means advertising on Instagram is going to be even more successful for your business. Sounds like a great reason to use Instagram, doesn't it? Let's move on to Twitter, the popular microblogging network. Twitter is the ultimate by the minute news network. It's a place where you can see what is happening in that very moment around the world, whether it's someone feeling an earthquake in China or watching a football game in Boston. Users share messages of up to 280 characters called tweets, which can include photos, videos, links and animated gifs. To give you a sense of the volume of information shared, there are more than 500 million tweets sent every day. Twitter is a fantastic place for you to discover what's trending with your industry, customers, employees, partners and prospects. You should be sharing content frequently, more frequently than on your other platforms in fact, and you should be engaging regularly with your audience. Twitter reports that 80% of advertisers inbound social customer service requests happen on Twitter. It's also a place where people frequently express both pleasure and dissatisfaction about products and services, making it a channel your business cannot afford to ignore. Twitter also owns Periscope, a live streaming video channel. Over 350,000 hours of live video are streamed on the network every day. There are several forms of advertising on Twitter, including ads in the news stream with trending topics, promoted profiles and a lot more. But one of the best uses of Twitter is the organic networking you can do directly with your audience, engaging in conversation that helps build loyalty and trust. LinkedIn is the platform most business to business or B2B marketers are familiar with. It used to be a network primarily used for recruiting, but these days it's also becoming a platform to find the latest news and to stay networked with people all over the world. Now users can share status updates much in the same way as they do with Facebook, with photo or video posts that can be shared, like, liked, or commented on. There are several reasons to use LinkedIn. It's a great way to look up individuals you might be meeting with or to find out more about a prospect you're interested in reaching out to. Additionally, it's a great place to build thought leadership, to offer value through targeted advertising to networking groups, and to share content that will drive links back into your website properties. Pinterest is a channel many people think of as only for business to consumer or or B2C. But there are a myriad of ways B2B companies can take advantage of the platform. If you aren't familiar with Pinterest, it's essentially a series of shared, often thematic bulletin boards where users can pin images, videos and links that resonate with them. What is unique to Pinterest is that the average life of a pin is over three months, whereas on Twitter a post's life is a matter of minutes and on Facebook maybe an hour. Pinterest Pins builds SEO with referral traffic, referral traffic that can turn directly into leads and sales. And while women used to make up the biggest audience for Pinterest, that's changing. 40% of new signups are now for men. So how can your company use Pinterest? Create a board with links to your products and services, or a board with your blog posts, or a board demonstrating your company's thought, leadership and awareness. Your HR team can benefit from a board detailing great things about working at your company. Consider creating boards for case studies, employee stories, white papers, or videos. The possibilities are truly endless. Snapchat is a channel that lost a bit of market share to Instagram when Instagram Stories launched, essentially copying the Snapchat business model. But it still has a strong user base, and it's moving into areas like augmented reality, which may have exciting applications like Instagram Stories. Snapchat stories disappear after 24 hours. There are a bevy of filters users can employ to liven up video and images. Today, brands can advertise with stories more dynamic and longer lasting than personal snaps. The Snapchat audience skews young, with its largest demographic between the ages of 12 to 24. It's a lot to learn about all of the social media channels. Do you need to be on all of them? Maybe not. But consider that not everyone gets their news and information in the same way you might read online newspapers while I'm looking at trending topics on Twitter. Everyone consumes information differently in the time and place of their choosing. You want to be found in as many of those places as possible, but the good news is that you can start small and focused and then build as your team builds and your resource pool grows. And don't be afraid to create profiles and test out the channels. They can often seem more overwhelming than they are, and once you dip your toe into the pool, the water gets warmer and warmer.