Which Social Media Platforms Should I Use?
At Marketing TEA, we know the VITAL role that social media plays in growing your business. At this point (because it’s 2018), we hope that you have also recognized the upside that social media COULD offer your business, even if you haven’t fully taken advantage of it yet. Creating direct connections, showing off killer content, giving away information and advice, participating in your community, maybe even buying the cheapest ad space out there. So yea, social media matters! We get asked by a lot of people exactly which social media platforms we recommend. And while the complicated answer may have Tyler going off on an hour long speech about embracing your personality, today we’re going to keep it simple with our best general recommendations for our TOP social media platforms you should focus on.
First is worst. (Just kidding) We get asked about Twitter a lot, which is why it’s in this blog post, even if it isn’t one of our top picks. It’s a quick way to make a joke, and it can relay information at the speed of light. Our main beef with Twitter is that it’s really hard to gain a following on Twitter right now. If you’ve already got 100k followers, you likely aren’t reading this blog anyways. But if your follower count is non-existent like most small businesses getting a start on their social media, it’ll be nearly impossible to up those follower numbers. Our #bottomline? Twitter makes it hard for you to gain traction and attention. So typically we’re going to recommend that you check out a different platform that can perform faster.
Instagram, on the other hand, is one of our favorite social media platforms! Instagram is for sharing an experience that goes beyond words. Share gorgeous images that stir up emotions and stick in people’s heads. You’re offering a meaningful service, and Instagram allows you to show it off and share with its over 800,000,000 monthly users. Instagram has a few features that allow you to appear to non-followers. Hashtags allow you to reach niche groups in your target market while Instagram’s Discover Page lets people see recommended users that many of their friends follow (which can be great for local services!)
A Marketing TEA pro tip? Instagram doesn’t allow you to post a link in a picture’s caption, so if you want your website to see some traffic, you might need to instruct followers how to get there. Use that ‘LINK IN BIO’ like we do on many of our @marketingtea posts.
Facebook is our other golden child here at Marketing TEA. To begin with, the platform is MASSIVE (despite what people say about a dying audience)! As of June this year, it reported over 2.23 BILLION monthly users! Because of its layout and its large audience, it’s an incredibly effective platform to organically grow or advertise your business. We could go on all day about the best features of Facebook, but one of our favorites is the ease with which your audience can share your great content. And the fact that Facebook is becoming primarily a platform of SHARING and VIDEOS matters. So, making a great video for your business could mean that it gets shared like crazy by your supporters and community. Believe us, we’ve seen it happen many times. We believe that Facebook is becoming THE platform for video content. There are over 8 billion video views per day on Facebook! This means that most people who are logging on are watching multiple videos throughout their day
But wait there’s more! Facebook Ads (which includes Instagram ads) is one of the most impactful and cost-efficient ways that you can get your content in front of your target audiences. When you create a great piece of content, don’t forget to use Facebook Ads to reach brand new people. Feel free to chat with us if you don’t believe what a massive impact this can make, and we’ll share some things that will blow your mind about Facebook Ads.
So there you have it! Our top 2 social media platforms that we believe you should be focusing on: Facebook and Instagram. Is there value to be found in other platforms out there? OF COURSE! But we need to end this blog post at some point, so we can’t cover them all. If you’re curious about exploring or finding out about other social media platforms, or if you’d just like to learn more about our top picks of Facebook and Instagram, get in touch with our team. We’d love to talk more about how you can use digital content marketing to grow your business!