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How To Choose The Best Social Media Platforms For Your Business

With so many different options out there, how do you choose the best social media platforms for your business?

It can be really daunting and overwhelming!

You know that it’s important for your business to have an online presence, but where the heck do you start, right?

There are always new platforms emerging and new updates for the existing ones!

So much change!

Why Use Social Media?

Before we work out how to choose the best social media platforms for your business, we need to answer a few questions around your expectations from social media…

Do you want a social presence for your business just to be ‘socially active’?

Are you looking to build brand awareness?

Do you want to generate leads and sales via the content that you post?

Will you want to leverage social media for its advertising capabilities?

Who are you trying to reach?

Which platforms do your target audience use?

Answering these questions will help establish the best platforms for you to consider.

After all, your social media activity needs to happen on a platform where your target audience is for it to be as effective!

Make Social Media Work For You

We want to make things a bit easier for you!

The first thing to do is to take a deep breath and let all that tension out…it’s going to be ok!

Here’s some good news!

Social media doesn’t need to be complicated and you don’t have to change everything you have ever done to make it work.

In fact, it’s the opposite.

You need to find a way to make social media work for you!

Social media at its core is about communication.

It’s that simple.

The trick is deciding how you can best ‘story tell’ on a platform where your target audience spends a lot of their time.

In the second part of this blog, we are going to provide you with key features, demographics and best practices for some of the top platforms.

How To Choose The Best Social Media Platforms

facebook logo

Facebook

The world’s biggest social media platform boasts more 2 billion monthly active users (MAU’s).

So in our honest opinion, having a Facebook presence for your business is not an option.

It’s a must!

Why you ask?

Think of Facebook as another Google.

If people want to find out more about your or your business, often times they will search on Facebook first!

Platform Demographics – Source: NapoleonCat.com

  • There were 17 320 000 Facebook users in Australia in September 2019, which accounted for 68.4% of its entire population.
  • The majority of them were women – 53.3%.
  • People aged 25 to 34 were the largest user group (4 600 000).
  • The highest difference between men and women occurs within people aged 55 to 64, where women lead by 330 000.
facebook statistics

What Facebook Does Best

Facebook connects people, business and brands.

It is also hands-down the most targeted digital advertising platform in the world.

Facebook is where you set up your social media ‘home base’, just like your website is your digital ‘home base’.

Best features for your business include:

  • The ability to connect with a vast number of people and prospects
  • Live streaming capabilities
  • The most targeted digital advertising platform in the world
  • eCommerce integrations

What Works Best for Facebook

  • Long-form written content in posts in the news feed
  • Facebook native video (published on Facebook, not a link) is given preference over other forms of content
  • Live streaming is given up to 6x more organic reach than other content

Instagram

Instagram started life as an image-based platform but has since evolved and is now owned by Facebook

instagram logo

The app now includes video, ephemeral stories and direct messaging.

Platform Demographics – Source: NapoleonCat.com

  • There were 9 253 000 Instagram users in Australia in September 2019, which accounted for 36.5% of its entire population.
  • The majority of them were women – 57.3%.
  • People aged 25 to 34 were the largest user group (3 100 000).
  • The highest difference between men and women occurs within people aged 35 to 44, where women lead by 320 000.

instagram statistics

What Instagram Does Best

‘Insta’ is perfect for businesses that have a visual or physical product.

Best features for your business include:

  • The ability to showcase your products or story tell in a visually appealing way
  • Document and take people behind the scenes with the Stories feature
  • Communicate with people on a deeper level via direct messaging

What Works Best On Instagram

  • High-quality images draw peoples eye and their attention
  • Quote and motivational images generally see high levels of engagement
  • Using hashtags with your posts increases their searchability and higher engagement levels
  • Giving people a more immersive experience by posting Instagram stories and video content

Snapchat

snapchat logo

In the beginning, Snapchat was a disappearing photo app used by teenagers with a reputation for circulating ‘inappropriate’ material.

In March 2017, Snapchat launched on the stock exchange and closed its first day being a more valuable company than Ferrari and United Airlines!

Today, Snapchat has over 150 million MAU’s worldwide with a younger demographic than most of the other top platforms.

Platform Demographics – Source: SocialMediaNews.com

  • 60% of all users are under 25 years of age
  • Largest Snapchat age demographic is 18- to 24-year-olds
  • 6.3 million monthly active users and 4.5 million daily active users in Australia.

What Snapchat Does Best

Snapchat allows you to communicate in a way that is the most realistic to humans.

The content you post has a limited lifetime of 24 hours before it disappears!

Best features for your business include:

  • The ability to reach a younger but highly engaged audience
  • Content that creates a sense of urgency because it doesn’t last forever
  • A ‘snapcode’ which can be scanned to easily allow people to connect people to your account
  • Direct messaging, audio messaging and voice calling all inside the platform itself

What Works Best On Snapchat

  • Being authentic and transparent
  • Content that is not highly produced. Don’t overthink it and try to make it perfect.
  • Consistent content helps to build a loyal audience.
  • Show your audience ‘behind the scenes’…feed people’s curiosity.  

Twitter

twitter logo

Gary Vaynerchuck calls Twitter the “water cooler of our society”.

Twitter is where you go for trending topics and news, to share short updates, communicate with people and search for things that you might need answers too.

Twitter can be a great tool in business for finding people you have a problem that your business can solve.

Platform Demographics – exalteddigital.com

  • Twitter has 317 million monthly active users worldwide. 4.6 million in Australia.
  • 36% of Twitter users are aged between 18 and 29.
  • Twitter users spend on average, 2.7 minutes on the platform every day.

What Twitter Does Best

Twitter provides you and your business a real-time communication channel with the rest of the world.

There has been a lot of talk over recent years about Twitter’s lack of innovation and issues with the way they deliver content in the feed.

But there has been a gradual revival in recent months, which is seeing Twitter’s value start to climb.

Best features for your business include:

  • The ability to communicate and engage on trending topics and events worldwide
  • Digital advertising  (can be rather pricey compared to Facebook for example)
  • Provide real time customer service

What Works Best On Twitter

  • Multiple posts or ‘tweets’ per day is recommended due to each post’s short timespan
  • Tweets with images or video show higher levels of engagement
  • Tweets with 2 hashtags perform better than tweets with none or multiple hashtags.

Are you feeling more confident about how to choose the best social media platforms for your business?

Youtube

Youtube was founded in 2005 by three former Paypal employees.

youtube logo

Today, it is the second biggest search engine in the world behind Google.

More than 100 hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every minute!

Platform Demographics – thinkwithgoogle.com

  • 16,500,000 Unique Australian Visitors per month (UAVs) at June 2019
  • Average watch time of 24 hours and 18 mintues per person per month
  • Monthly users is 48% male to 52% female.

What Youtube Does Best

Youtube is one of the best places in the world to house your video content and share it with the world.

There are many other video hosting platforms that are amazing in their own right including Wistia and Vimeo, each with their own pro’s and con’s.

Youtube however, has the volume of traffic and eyeballs with one-third of all internet users on the platform.

It is also free to create an account and add as much video content as you can!

Best features for your business include:

  • An unlimited amount of video hosting
  • High levels of traffic and viewers
  • All content is searchable via Youtube and Google
  • Monetisation options are also offered for those that meet certain criteria

What Works Best On Youtube

  • The length of video doesn’t matter, it’s the quality and value of the content that counts
  • Thumbnails that are vibrant and catch people’s eye will generally lead to more views overall
  • Using a tool like TubeBuddy, will allow you to add tags and optimise your videos for better engagement and searchability.

LinkedIn

People often refer to LinkedIn as the ‘professional’ version of Facebook.

LinkedIn logo

LinkedIn was started in 2003 and is one of the older social networking sites having survived many ups, downs and technology changes over the years.

In 2016, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 billion with plans to integrate the platform with its Windows software.

Best features for your business include:

  • An engaged community of people with a business mindset and focus while using the platform
  • A more professional setting for your business to be ‘social active’.
  • The ability to create both personal and company pages for greater brand awareness
  • The ability to share and promote job vacancies, promotions, and share career opportunities
  • Digital advertising (can be rather pricey compared to Facebook for example)

Platform Demographics – socialmedianews.com.au

What Works Best On LinkedIn

  • Posting a range of content from white papers, ebooks, video and case studies
  • Posting multiple times per day and being socially active!
  • Publish written content on Publisher with is linked to your profile
  • Joining groups and engaging with other people’s content

Test, Measure, Repeat.

At the end of the day, these are just some of the top social media platforms.

Creative is the variable for success.

What you do and the value you provide determines the overall results you have with social media.

Remember that while each platform has certain functions, doing things differently is what helps you stand out!

There is not always one ‘perfect’ social media platform for your business.

Like many things, it is about testing, measuring and repeating.

Try things and if they don’t work, try something else!

Remain authentic. Provide value. Be socially active.

At the end of the day, being true to yourself, your brand and caring about the person at the other end is the most important thing.

We hope this article will help you choose the best social media platforms for your business.

If you have any questions please leave a comment below, we would be happy to help!

Thank you for your time!