There are multiple reasons why businesses should be using social media:
Drive traffic – By posting engaging content on a regular basis, you can increase the traffic to your pages. This can lead to an increase in likes, follows and more users on your website.
Customer connections – An essential part of building relationships is being able to interact and communicate with your customers. Social media is the perfect place to start and develop relationships due to being able to instantly message the business’ page and receive faster responses than with emails, or to engage with the content being published.
Revenue – The increase in traffic, customer relationships and engagement can increase the sales made; if you have a strong social media strategy that includes support and PR, you can significantly increase the number of sales you are currently making.
Online presence and branding – Having an online presence is also beneficial for increasing your brand awareness. By developing and growing your social media presence, this increases the chance of brand awareness for both existing and potential customers. Social media allows your brand to discover new customers that could potentially have never found your business.
Which social media platform would be best for my business?
To put it simply, it very much depends on your audience, your business and what you would like to achieve. Every business will have different audiences and products which will impact whether different platforms would be beneficial or not. Below, we have listed a range of popular social media platforms we use in our social media strategies. We’ve included their benefits and drawbacks allowing you to decide which social media platforms might be useful for your business.
Facebook is arguably one of the most popular platforms for businesses to use. With over 2 billion monthly active users, there is the potential to reach a large audience with the correct social media strategy and management. Facebook posts can be just text, images or videos, with opportunities to create carousels for ads. Facebook’s engagement, according to Rival IQ, has stayed relatively the same since 2020, with all industries combined having an average engagement rate of 0.08%.
Advantages
-Increased brand awareness
-Facebook has the most amount of active users than any other social media platform
-Creating a Facebook page is free
Disadvantages
-Facebook is not frequently used by the younger generations, so it can be difficult to target a younger audience on Facebook.
-Running a Facebook page is free, but to advertise, you will have to bid for ads.
-In order to stay within Facebook’s algorithm, it is important to be regularly publishing content
Instagram is a social media platform dedicated to posting images and videos. With video and image being a very popular type of marketing, it is perfect for businesses to maximise their engagement. However, according to Rival IQ, Instagram has seen a decrease overall in engagements, with a 25% decrease in engagements in 2021, in comparison to 2020.
Advantages:
-Perfect for visually pleasing brands
-Primarily younger based audience
Disadvantages:
-Labour intensive to see benefits
-Not ideal for reaching older audiences
-Restrictive reporting of metrics, which can lead to only being able to view 30 days of historical data.
LinkedIn is a popular social media platform for professionals to network with other like-minded individuals. With over 740 million active users, LinkedIn is perfect for individuals or businesses looking to connect with others in the industry.
<b<Advantages:
-Ideal for self-employed, freelancers and B2B companies
-Can develop business partners and relationships
-Paid versions that allows you to message users without the need for connecting
-Can promote business-related content
-Perfect platform for networking and generating business
Disadvantages:
-Not ideal for standard B2C businesses or eCommerce
-Paid versions can become very expensive
– Not able to message users unless you are connected on the platform
Twitter is a social media platform that is perfect for companies wanting to provide a fast level of customer service. Due to being popular with many journalists, Twitter is used frequently by many celebrities and MPs to share news, stories and updates.
Advantages:
-Easy to engage followers with targeted hashtags and account tags
-Ability to quickly reply to customer queries promotes the perfect customer service platform
Disadvantages:
-Most effective use of Twitter requires multiple tweets a day
YouTube
YouTube is a video-based social media platform. YouTube is primarily used for entertainment and information. They have an average monthly active user base of 2 billion users.
Advantages:
-YouTube is video-based, which tends to be more popular than written content. This leads to an increase of traffic
-Using videos can work well with other marketing strategies, such as blogs
-Successful videos can apply for AdSense which creates another channel of revenue for the business
-Content is easily shareable. The video uploaded can be shared on a majority of popular platforms and can be embedded on to websites
-YouTube is a huge platform full of content for a large range of topics, meaning there will be an audience for your business
Disadvantages:
-Videos are very time consuming to produce
-It is essential for certain industries to have high-quality visuals and audio to be able to compete with other businesses, such as property and interior design.
-It is difficult to get noticed if you are wanting a quick exposure. Regularly uploading content will overtime bring more exposure if the content is relatable
TikTok
TikTok is the newest social media platform to explode in popularity, especially for younger generations. TikTok is a short video-based platform, meaning that you can post 30 second enticing videos about your business that could reach a large audience.
Advantages:
-Easy to reach younger generations
-TikTok has a high engagement rate if the video is relatable
-Videos can easily go viral and gain millions of views with a low level of input
– Easy to use and start creating content
– Does require regular video posting to show TikTok you an an active customer
– Many opportunities for advertising as lower costs than other platforms like Google and Facebook
Disadvantages:
-Harder to reach older generations
– Viral videos can bring both positive and negative impacts. You need to be prepared for anything to happen if millions see your business/product. Can you meet the demand of orders? What if the publicity brings malicious users, do you have security in place to combat this etc?
– Certain restrictions on content that you can use when you set up a ‘business profile’
– Takes time to access longer length videos up to 3 minutes
In conclusion, there are a large range of benefits when taking your business online through social media platforms. Different platforms will be suited to different businesses, however there will always be a place for your brand in the social world.
If you need any help setting up, managing or advertising on social media, our team at Unbranded Digital are here to help. We have a specialised team on hand to help you through the vast world of social media. If you want to get in touch and talk to our team about taking your social media to the next level, contact us at hello@unbranded.digital or call us on 01274 905511.
Are you interested in social media management? Please get in touch!
