Which Social Media Platform is Best for Marketing?

Social media can be a powerful tool that blows up your business, but if you’re on the wrong platforms it could be wasting your efforts.

As a business owner, the truth is that you want to achieve your marketing goals, and social media marketing can help you do that.

However, you must use the right social media platform for your products and audience.

Each platform is unique and supports different, sometimes similar, marketing strategies. Therefore, you'll need to understand how they work and which is more important for your business.

Luckily in this article, you will discover all you need to know about social media marketing and which platform is best for your marketing goals.

Also, you'll understand the factors you need to prioritize to choose the right social media platform for marketing.

Social Media Platforms and Marketing

Marketing advances your product and service sales, and social media is one of the most potent tools for marketing.

You may be familiar with large social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but there are newer and relatively smaller platforms that can advance your marketing efforts.

Using all social media platforms may seem like the best way to reach more people for your product and services, but that's not true.

Some factors determine the right platform to use for marketing. Each of these free social media platforms for businesses is peculiar and attracts certain types of people.

To choose the best marketing platform, the right question is are the people who are of interest to you there?

Here are some of the best social media platforms for marketing for 2022.

TikTok (Best for B2C, Younger Audience)

TikTok is a fairly new social media platform that appeals to the younger generation. It allows users to create original video and audio content.

A common feature is the creation of video content for already existing audio tracks.

You can achieve marketing on TikTok through

• TikTok influencers
• Advertising
• and Creating content on your TikTok business account.

With TikTok, you have a direct connection to young customers that may be interested in your product.

You can set your business (product and service) type on your TikTok account and reach a dedicated young audience, thanks to the social media platform's algorithm.  

Cosmetics, fashion, arts and crafts, dance, skates and skating, are a few of the common interests of the TikTok audience.

Twitter (Best for Short-form Text Content)

If your marketing question is usually like, "Which social media platform should I use?" You can consider Twitter, as it is one of the best marketing platforms to know the latest trends in your industry or interests.

Twitter accommodates every adult age category you can think of and it uses text as its means of communication, although you can often use pictures.

However, your text has to be concise. With the use of hashtags, you can be a part of trending topics and market your products and services that relate to relevant topics and hashtags.

You can do marketing on Twitter through:

• Advertisements
• Creating and customizing your brand on Twitter
• Hosting Twitter chats
• Using Twitter moments.
  

With Twitter, you can drive traffic to your website, generate leads by creating Twitter lists and improve your follower count, especially through Twitter spaces, and improve sales.

Facebook (Best for B2B)

If you're looking to reach other businesses easily through social media, Facebook is one of the places to consider, as other businesses need your services and products there.

You can join groups, follow pages with which you share the same product and service interests, and find your customers.

Facebook marketing includes

• Advertising
• Creating content, including text, images, and videos, on your Facebook page.
• Being active in relevant Facebook groups, and  
• Creating the perfect Facebook marketing strategy.

You have access to businesses and business owners in the same Facebook communities as you are, and you can easily strike up a conversation about your product and services with them.

You can also track your reach and engagement with your business's Facebook page.

LinkedIn (Best for B2B)

LinkedIn is regarded as a professional social media platform. It's a place where professionals in every industry you can think of, congregate to show their recent business accomplishments.

It is a good place to focus your marketing efforts if your target is businesses and business owners.

Your marketing efforts on LinkedIn should start with optimizing your profile to show your relevance and offerings to your target audience. Being similar to Facebook, LinkedIn helps your marketing efforts as you can:

• Join communities that are relevant to your industry and audience.
• Create engaging and valuable content
• Reach out to prominent people in your industry through InMail.
• Track your engagements and reach through LinkedIn's inbuilt analytics.
• Run advertisements.
  

You can create leads from your content engagement and LinkedIn analytics. You can also reach those that matter and get responses with InMail. Advertisements widen your reach.

YouTube (Best for long-form video, Both B2B and B2C, Entertaining/Educating)

YouTube is arguably the oldest long-form video content social media platform. Its content is generally geared at educating users with different interests but it can also be entertaining.

It targets all groups of audiences you can think of, and it's suitable for targeting both consumers and businesses.

While YouTube now encourages short-form video content, long-form content still holds an important place in channels' relevance.

To start YouTube marketing, you need to:

• Create a YouTube channel
• Create and post relevant and valuable video content
• Promote your video content on other social media platforms
• Optimize your video content meta descriptions.
• Run advertisements.
  

YouTube is best for providing guides and solving problems that your audience may have. Your product or service probably helps to solve these problems.

You can also monetize your YouTube channel and use it as another source of income. It's also helpful to drive traffic to your website.

Instagram (Best for B2C, Visual)

With over one billion active daily users, Instagram is one of the most accessible social media platforms, and one of the most effective for your social media marketing.

Instagram focuses on images as its content, hence, it's colorful and attractive. It's a good consideration for businesses that have products and services with catchy physical tools or products.

With Instagram, you can access your potential customers as long as your audience is 18 years and above. You'll enjoy Instagram marketing by:

• Creating an account and posting visual content
• Optimize your Instagram bio
• Using Instagram influencers
• Run advertisements
  

You'll also enjoy an advantage as you can link your Facebook and Instagram account for easier content management on both platforms.

Pinterest (Best for Female Audience)

Pinterest is a visual social media platform that provides its users with pictorial guides, inspirations, and ideas on different interests.

The majority of Pinterest users are females, and their interests range from fashion to interior design, arts, and gardening, among others.

However, you can find a male audience with an interest in fitness and automobiles.

Pinterest marketing involves:

• Optimizing your Pinterest business account to suit your audience's interests.
• Consistently posting visual content and optimizing them.
• Free Pinterest analytics for your engagements and reach.
• Easy traffic from Pinterest to your website.
• Ranking on top search engines such as Google.
  

If you have a product that's peculiar to a female audience, such as make-up kits, and cosmetic and skincare products, Pinterest may be the right social media platform to market them.

Snapchat (Best for B2C, Local Businesses)

Snapchat, unlike YouTube, is a short-form video and picture content sharing platform that utilizes filters, geotags, and lenses.

Because your content on Snapchat is usually temporary (they disappear after 24 hours), you need to consistently put content out there to promote your brand and product.

Its attention-grabbing and short content is geared toward the younger generation. Snapchat allows you to have easy access to your customers.

You can achieve good results with Snapchat marketing by:

• Creating a Snapchat account and optimizing your bio.
• Create attractive visual and video content regularly.
• Use branded filters and lenses to appeal to your audience.
• Use geolocation to show your address and loc relevance.
  

Snapchat is considered suitable for small businesses that target an audience that's not older than 34 years old.

You can create ads on Snapchat but you'll have more success through consistent and quality content posting.

How to Choose the Right Platform for Your Business

With so many social media platforms for businesses, it is stressful trying to create content for them all.

Also, some of these platforms aren't right for your business and you'll be wasting your resources creating content for them.

You need to choose the right platforms for your business, but that's also tricky.

Some determinants and factors influence which social media is right for your business.

Also, your choice of social media platforms influences the types of content you put out and the content strategy you should adopt. Before you choose a social media platform for your business, consider the following:

Think about your audience

Your audience is the most important factor in deciding which social media platform is best for your business. Your audience refers to the demography that needs your product and service.

If the audience for your product or service is male and female between the ages of 18 and 40, the ideal social platform you should choose for marketing is Instagram.

However, since your audience isn't the only determining factor for choosing the right social media platform for marketing, put brakes on making that decision.

Think about the nature of your content

What type of content helps you describe your product or service best? Does your audience prefer a certain type of content?

These questions also help you determine the type of content you should use for marketing on social media platforms and choose the right platform for marketing. Your content also helps you to grow your audience.

Generally, you'll find better engagement for promoting brands and products through visuals and videos, but that also depends on your audience.

For text content, Twitter is the best social media platform. However, if you'll need to combine text, images, and videos, you may consider Facebook. Pinterest and Snapchat are strictly for visuals and short videos while YouTube is for long-form video content.

Three to five social media platforms may be suitable for your marketing needs, and your audience. You may have to hire someone to help with your content creation. You may also need social media managers to ease your workload.

Create a strategy around the most important platform(s)

Having recognized your audience, where they hang out, and the type of content that appeals to them, you'll need to create a strategy that reaches them and helps you generate leads and improve sales.

Note that you don't have to use all social media platforms. Only the most relevant ones to your product and audience should take your resources.

Also, each of these social media platforms may require different marketing strategies, while some of them can use overlapping marketing strategies.

In other words, you can focus on influencer marketing on some of these platforms, and concentrate on content creation and promotion on another.

Research and Plan Content

Content is central to the performance of your marketing efforts. Posting the right content at the right time will put your brand in the face of your audience and help you gain more recognition. Also, passing correct information gives you credibility. Therefore, you need some tools to help you with research, planning, and drafting.

Tools for high-performing topics and content ideas

Some of the tools that can help you research high-performing topics and content ideas for social media marketing include:

• Buzzsumo
• Awario
• Tweethunter for Twitter
• Quora
• Sprout social
• Feedly

Create a content calendar

A content calendar helps you to assign certain content for certain dates. You have predetermined content for a particular date. Content calendars make posting and managing your scheduling easier. Some tools for creating a content calendar include:

• Loomly
• Hootsuite
• Google Drive
• Evernote
• Sprout social
• Trello

Schedule and plan ahead

For an active and consistent social media presence, you need to plan to reduce the workload. Some tools that'll help with this include:

• Sendible
• Hootsuite
• Brandwatch
• AgoraPulse
• Onlypult
  

Final Thoughts

Social media marketing is tough but powerful. Therefore, if you've been wondering which social media platform is best for marketing, consider your audience, and the nature of your content, and have a strategy that suits the platform your audience is present.

You may need to hire a professional to help with content creation and management for social media marketing to ease the workload.