Social media is all about reaching your target audience and consumers—where they are and how they prefer to connect with your business. With its benefits of reaching millions of customers globally, a social media marketing strategy has become one of the most significant parts of any digital marketing plan. But what are the best social media platforms for business currently and how will social media help me market my business?
It is perfect for business owners who want to:
- Increase their brand recognition
- Elevate customer engagement
- Target new markets
- Boost traffic
- Improve marketplace awareness
- Increase SEO rankings
All with a cost-effective price tag and a measureable ROI.
Social media marketing involves promoting and sharing content on various social media platforms to reach a larger audience and engage with them. It can be an essential part of a content marketing strategy because social media platforms allow businesses to connect with their target audience, build relationships, and drive traffic to their website.
How to choose the right social media platform for your business
How many social media channels should I choose?
So, it’s best for me to put my business out there on every social media channel—right? Should a business be active on all social media platforms to gain a competitive edge and target every potential prospect out there?
No!
The first thing you need to know is that when it comes to choosing which social media channel is less is more. Being active on one to a few channels can be a good idea—being active on every site isn’t. You want to make sure that when you post, you are focusing on posting and authentically engaging–efficiently.
How to choose which social media platform to use
Answer these 5 questions to figure out which social media channel is best for your business:
- Who are your customers (define your buyer personas & audience personas)
- Where do these customers hang out online?
- What channels do your competitors dedicate the most effort to?
- What are your social media marketing goals?
- What is your social media budget and bandwidth?
The first thing you need to do is to ask yourself two important questions. “Where are my customers?” and “Where are my competitors?” Find out where they are, based on their demographics, interests, and online behavior—and get there!
Learn how to define your buyer personas (target audiences) using our free template and guide.
Next, what are your goals? If you don’t have goals and objectives, you can’t measure your performance. What do you want to achieve on social media? If the main thing you want is to increase brand awareness, you may choose a completely different channel than if you are wanting a channel to sell a product.
And your budget? With a smaller budget, you may only be able to target one channel to start with. If you try to cover more channels, it could result in low -quality interaction and content.
Let’s take a look at the channels and their benefits to help you decide your best moves.
What are the top social media channels?
We’ll review (in no particular order) the seven popular social media channels for businesses with customer bases in the North American region. We’ve selected the top 7 social media channels that provide the best opportunity to build a follower base and engage with your prospects:
- YouTube
- TikTok
Primary Audience:
The largest user age group is 25-34 years old (30%)
Gender split of 43% female, 57% male (no data on other genders)
Best way to engage with your audience:
- Videos
- Short and specific posts
- Know your target audience
- Post frequently and timely
- Highlight and engage with current customers
- Understand your Facebook analytics
Top industries / topics:
Apparel, Beauty, Education, Ecommerce, Entertainment, Fitness, Legal, Retail, Real Estate
Marketing Purpose/Business Model:
93% of businesses promote their companies via Facebook. They know that using Facebook as a digital marketing channel:
- Raises brand awareness & trust
- Provides and highlights customer service
- Promotes online selling
Primary Audience:
The largest user group by age is represented by one out of every three US adults between 30 and 49 years old. Globally, for LinkedIn users, 58% of users are adults aged between 25 and 34 years old and 57% of users are men, and 43% women.
Popular topics for LinkedIn:
- Customer stories
- Career motivational posts
- Research and insights
- Skill building / educational / how-to
- Lead generation
- Brand building
- Work life (transparency, humor)
- Question / poll style posts
Best way to engage with your audience:
- Write and post consistently
- Build relationships beyond likes—email and chat with them offline
- Be interested in others first—show this by commenting and engaging
- Promote others
- Be a value-add by providing education
- Invite others to contribute
Top Industries:
IT and Services, Hospital & Health Care, Construction, Consulting/Coaches, Retail, Education Management, Financial Services, Computer Software, Accounting, Automotive, Higher Education
Marketing Purpose/Business Model:
Even though LinkedIn is a more useful marketing channel for B2B businesses, 44% of marketers are also using it in their B2C marketing strategy.
It is useful for:
- Driving traffic to your website
- Promoting product/service pages
- Highlighting blog posts
- Identifying ready-to-buy sales leads
Primary Audience:
Most of Twitter’s audience is 25-34 years old. 70.4% of Twitter users are male, only 29.6% female.
Best way to engage with your audience:
- Use actionable words—like asking people to “download”, for “retweet”, “follow,” or ”reply”
- Make the most of visual elements
- Jump in on a trending conversation
- Create polls on relevant topics
- Interact with your customers’ Tweets
Best topics for Twitter: Trends change rapidly overnight, but Twitter is great for posting about breaking news or research, and trends that are relatable to your industry and what your audience has interest in.
Top Industries:
Any brand that puts a focus on Politics, Blue Collar industries, Media industries (including Sports Media), Restaurants/Cafés, Jewelry, Home-living, Fashion
Marketing Purpose/Business Model:
The vast majority of brands using Twitter are B2C. They are turning to Twitter for things like:
- Troubleshooting issues, solving grievances, and satisfying customers
- Gaining valuable customer insights
- Build brand personality and awareness
- Gathering feedback
- Creation and nurture of a brand community
Primary Audience:
38% of Pinterest users are between 50-64 years old. Although women make up 77% of its core audience, the number of male users has risen by 40% year over year.
Best way to engage with your audience:
- Be an active user
- Create group boards
- Create customer-focused pin boards
- Host a contest
- Use your boards for market testing new products or services
Best topics for Pinterest:
Topics that are related to below industries such as travel & leisure, fitness, health, nutrition, recipes, DIY home projects, interior decorating, makeup, skincare, hairstyles, apparel, and motivational quotes.
Industries Pinterest is Best For:
Travel, Health and wellness, Home renovation / Interior Design, Retail / Fashion, Beauty, Food and drink, Business / Executive / Life Coaches
Marketing Purpose/Business Model:
Most popular for B2C marketers, the number of B2B marketers on Pinterest is growing.
For both B2C and B2B, users find the benefits of:
- Boosted SEO
- Heightened brand awareness
- Increased traffic
- Quality leads
- Social sharing
YOUTUBE
Primary Audience:
95% of internet users between the ages of 18-29 years old are on YouTube. 73% of users aged 36-45 and 70% of users aged 46-55 are also on YouTube. 53.9% of YouTube users are men and 46.1% are women. (There’s no data for other genders at this time.)
Best way to engage with your audience:
- Take the initiative to engage first
- Reply to comments—as many as you can
- Thank people for sharing
- Give a question to answer
- Encourage community interaction
- Offer more value and engagement than you ask for
Industry / Topics: Tech, Gaming, Food & Drink, Beauty, Fashion, Education, Toys
Marketing Purpose/Business Model:
The marketers using YouTube’s valuable benefits is nearly split in half for both B2B and B2C.
By using YouTube, marketers enjoy the ability to:
- Increase and drive views
- Encourage engagement
- Amplify sales
- Boost brand recognition
- Drive organic traffic to website
TIKTOK
Primary Audience:
43% of their global audience is 18-24 years old. 32% are between 25-34 years old. Only 3.4% of the TikTok audience is over 55.
57% of TikTok users are female, 43% are male.
Best way to engage with your audience:
- Reply to your audience comments
- Cross-promote your videos
- Use hashtags
- Post at the right time
- Educate your followers
- Create unusual content
- Share behind-the-scenes videos
- Join or make your own challenge
- Collaborate with influencers
Industries & Topics Best for TikTok:
Beauty, Food & Beverage, Fashion, Jewelry, Art, Home-Living, Tech , Travel, Toys
Marketing Purpose/Business Model:
For B2B, TikTok can be the perfect way to do things like showcase how customers use their products, provide educational business content, help their customers reach new audiences. By doing this, companies can improve brand awareness, increase followers, and right along with that, sales.
B2C companies use TikTok for the opportunity to quickly reach an audience, in the US, as well as internationally. Many of them appreciate their limitless and ever-growing pool of influencers to choose from. This helps many of them stay ahead of their competitors while growing their audience and ultimately increasing brand recognition and sales.
Primary Audience:
The majority of Instagram users are 25-34 years old at 31.2% with the next group, 31% of users being 18-24.
The male/female split for users is fairly even. 51.6% men and 48.4% women.
Best way to engage with your audience:
- Engage with similar accounts in your industry every day
- Engage with your content directly before and after you post
- Use strong captions
- Post plenty of photos of people (like you!)
- Reply to comments as soon as possible
- Track your best time to post
- Use Stories & Reels to draw attention to your posts
Popular topics for Instagram: Topics related to industries mentioned below as well as posts that showcase beauty, DIY, humor, lifestyle, motivation, music, photography, and video.
Best Industries for Instagram:
Beauty, Entertainment, Fashion, Food, Home Interior Design, Parenting, Photography/Film, Travel, Art, Pets/Animal, Real Estate
Marketing Purpose/Business Model:
B2B marketers use Instagram to:
- Promote local business
- Build brand authenticity & authority
- Provide customer support
B2C marketers using Instagram and creating content that aligns with their core values and culture with the right messaging can:
- Establish better brand recall
- Kick-start conversations with their audiences
- Draw traffic to their websites
- Drive purchases
Which social media platform is best for my business
In our opinion:
As a business owner, social media is your answer to things like targeting new markets, engaging with new and past customers, building brand awareness, and ultimately increasing sales.
In our experience:
Knowing how, where, and when to put yourself out there is the key to unlocking your highest opportunities and largest ROI. After you’ve defined your brand’s buyer personae, identify your target audience, and define their audience personae too.
Your audience persona looks at the larger group as a whole (vs. your buyer persona which zooms in to the individual level). Ask yourself, what topics and questions are your audience personae interested in and what social media channels do they use to gather insight on these topics?
Why we chose what we chose:
If you are a small business owner or solopreneur, and you are asking which social media channel is best for your business, then you need to test out some of the most used social media platforms first, one-by-one.
Social media works best for a business when a business posts often and consistently, and engages often and consistently with their target audience. So, choose 1-2 platforms that you have the bandwidth for, lay out a solid social media strategy, and test out the platform for 6-12 months before deciding to add another platform to your portfolio.
Need a free Trello template to manage your social media marketing, improve engagement and ROI? Check out our free social media plan template where we also give you social media topic ideas and social media account checklists to make the process automated and easy.
In addition to the top social media channels for businesses that we have listed in this article, other channels to consider are WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, Quora, Meetup, Nextdoor and Alignable.
We are here to help.
You can DIY by grabbing our FREE Best Social Media Channels for Business download, or 1-PG Marketing Plan Template.
Need more than DIY?
We will build you a custom 12 Month Digital Strategy Plan and help guide you all the way through.
