Which Social Media Channels Are Best for Your Business?
Should your business be present on social media? The short answer is likely yes. Social media is a great way to promote your brand and gain exposure. However, you don’t need to jump on board every popular social media network to maximize your reach.
Creating a marketing strategy for you or your client comprises many parts, including which social media channels to use for your business. With so many options to choose from, deciding which ones deserve your attention can be difficult, but in the long run, it will help you get the best possible return for your posts.
Keep in mind: quality always trumps quantity. It’s better to choose two or three platforms to engage with and consistently post high-quality, engaging content than to spread yourself over many channels but post-lower-quality content because you’re spread too thin. Social media requires management and focusing on a couple of networks will allow more time to meaningfully interact and engage with your audience, which ultimately leads to more conversions and customers.
So how do you decide which channels are best suited to your business? Do you go for the large and most well-established favorites, like Facebook? Or do you opt for an up-and-coming network that has less competition? In order to make this decision and also decide what types of content to produce, it’s essential to establish social media goals. Remember if you don’t have goals and objectives, you’ll have no way to measure your performance (which is key for sustainable social media success).
To set these goals, ask yourself: "What do I want to achieve on social media?"
Below are some popular, well-known social media channels, each with pros and cons. Take a look and consider which might be best for your business and reaching your social media goals:
1. Facebook is a highly popular social media network with a large and varied audience (as of 2020, it had over 2.7 billion active monthly users!) When used correctly, a Facebook page can be invaluable to a small business; it can be used to share everything from photos to important company updates and your audience can easily engage with your content. With a business account, you have access to powerful advertising tools and in-depth analytics, which will be helpful for measuring success. 
2. Instagram is also incredibly popular, with around 1 billion active users in 2020. Instagram (IG) 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's important to note that this platform is almost entirely mobile- there is no way to take photos or create new posts on a desktop. 
3. Twitter is great for short updates, engaging with followers, and sharing links to blog posts. 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 have interesting content and can voice that content in a concise and engaging way, Twitter is a great tool for quickly spreading news and information. Hashtags help boost posts, and if a user with a lot of followers retweets you, your content could go viral. However, if you're a highly visual business or you don't have a strong brand voice, you may want to skip this network.
- 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.
This visually oriented platform allows users to save and display content by "pinning" digital bulletin boards, which can be organized by category. 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 business hours. 
- YouTube is a video-sharing platform where people can view, upload, rate, share, and comment on video content. Now owned by Google, the site is a huge hub for news and entertainment. If you’re going to use video content in your social media strategy, it makes sense to take advantage of this platform and master YouTube SEO, too. Many businesses on YouTube have a creative, visual, or educational component. The platform is heavily creative in nature, so it might be a good idea for you to have a dedicated video editor to produce high-quality content. While you can create an entire channel for your business, you are able to post and market on this platform without one.
- TikTok, the relatively new hit platform where users create and share short videos, can be a successful option for businesses, but only if used properly. Because TikTok is mostly popular with the infamously discerning Gen Z, it can be difficult to strike the right tone to reach this crowd and be successful as a business. If you want to create a TikTok account, make sure you have a keen understanding of your brand and how that translates to TikTok specifically.
Quick Tip: TikTok was highlighted as the emerging platform at Social Day 2019, a conference for social media marketers.
- LinkedIn is designed to be more professional than other social media platforms and is geared toward businesses and professionals. It is the best platform for professional networking. It's a great place to find top talent, position yourself as an industry leader, and promote your business. Users create profiles that are similar to resumes, and companies can create pages that showcase their business. You can also join industry-specific LinkedIn Groups to ask and answer questions, which can help you establish brand recognition and bring users to your company page and website.
Whatever networks you may choose, remaining engaged with your social media accounts is crucial; it helps build an active audience. Having hundreds of thousands of followers doesn’t mean much if they’re not actively engaged with your content- liking, sharing, commenting, etc. The size of your brand’s account doesn’t mean much if no one is paying attention to it.
If you’re still not entirely sure where to start, take the time to explore each of these platforms on your own to get a better feel for how they work and how users engage and interact with each other and businesses. You can also consider experimenting with each platform to get a better feel for what will work best for you and your brand. Once you have some experience, expand and focus your attention only on the networks that are the best fit. Always remember, at the end of the day, quality is more important than quantity- choose only platforms that you can consistently dedicate your time and attention to!
