What Social Media Platform Is Best For You And Your Industry?
As influencer marketing and social media marketing go hand-in-hand, it is important to ensure you are active on the right platforms for your industry
Influencer marketing and social media marketing go hand-in-hand. In fact, it is quite hard to do influencer marketing if you don’t have an active presence on the key social media platforms for your industry. Everyone knows about Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but just because they’re the most popular, or perhaps the ones you hear about most, that doesn’t mean they are the best fit for your brand and message.
Likewise, when a brand implements an influencer marketing strategy to join forces with digital influencers, the campaign needs to be on a platform that is relevant to the brand and the target market. As most influencer marketing campaigns are digital, they either live on or are shared via a social media platform, so the platform needs to be relevant to your target market and you also need to have an active presence there otherwise your influencer marketing efforts will flop.
Instead of securing an account on every single social media platform, focus your efforts on the 2 or 3 key platforms that have the most appeal to your target market, reach your social media KPIs and optimize conversions from owned media and influencer marketing campaigns on the platform.
So, what social media platforms are best for you and your industry? Here, we give you a snapshot on 7 social media platforms and tell you what industries perform best on each and why.
What You Need To Know
Facebook is great for reach, engagement, views, impressions and driving traffic to a website or blog, however, the community aspect of Facebook has slowly slipped away as the algorithm continues to change. As a result, Facebook content needs to be supported by a paid strategy if you want it to have a visible impact on your business. Facebook is all about quality over quantity and encouraging engagement, so the reach of your content is actually more important than the number of followers and fans you have. Facebook also has a good analytics feature which you can use to gain an insight into how your content is performing (paid and unpaid) and what you can do to optimise it for your audience.
Who Should Use It?
Facebook is great for any industry that has a media budget for the platform. If you’ve never boosted a post on Facebook with a paid strategy, read our step-by-step guide to boosting a Facebook post first to ensure you make the most out of your budget and target strategically so you only pay for highly relevant eyeballs on your content. If you don’t have media budget to spend on Facebook, read more about increasing your Facebook reach organically here and learn more about getting more likes on your page here so you can do as much as you can to optimise and create engagement on your page.
In terms of target market, Facebook is particularly great if you are targeting baby boomers and generations X and Y because they are generally most engaged on this platform and the average age of users on Facebook is much higher than other social media platforms.
What you need to know:
The first thing you need to know about Instagram is that it is a highly visual platform, so Instagram content needs to be of a high-quality and aesthetically pleasing. For the best results, your entire feed should also have a theme and colour palette and each image should go well with the ones before and after. Recently, Instagram announced that its algorithm is changing to order a user’s feed by most relevant (like Facebook), rather than by chronological order. So, with the new algorithm change, it is even more important to focus on creating fabulous content for Instagram that will drive engagement.
To find out more about how to create great Instagram content, check out these 8 free Instagram tools you should be using, get flatlay tips here and learn how to get more Instagram followers.
Who should use it?
Instagram is best for brands, publishers and influencers in lifestyle industries, such as travel, fashion, beauty, food and home and interior design. Of course, you can use the platform for other things, but we’ve found that these lifestyle topics perform the best on Instagram, especially if your target audience is women between the ages of 16 and 40 years old.
Finally, Instagram is best for brand awareness, to build relationships and communicate with your community as there is no opportunity to include links in individual posts (unless sponsored). If driving sales and converting followers to paying customers is your main deliverable, you can still use Instagram, however, it is much harder to measure conversions so you need to be creative in your Instagram strategy.
Youtube
What you need to know:
At the beginning of the year, we predicted video content would be bigger and better (and more important too) in 2016, and we weren’t wrong! If you want to make your content marketing strategy more engaging, start a Youtube channel, add some video content into the mix and share it across your other social media platforms. There are a lot of options when it comes to video content, so put your creative hat on and strategize how you can use Youtube and video content to share your marketing message with your target customers. Video content is also a great way to partner with publishers, influencers, content creators and vloggers from the project management and creation stage right through to digital distribution.
Who should use it?
Any business that can add value through video content is perfect for Youtube, especially if there is a how-to video or do-it-yourself element. Video content is also great for storytelling and introducing your businesses to consumers and communicate your brand message interactively. We have seen video content work across a wide range of industries, from fashion, beauty, food and travel to business, home design and construction and health and wellness, so think about how you can repurpose some of your content marketing assets to create valuable video content in your content marketing strategy.
For some fast facts on video marketing, check out this infographic from the team at HubSpot.
What you need to know:
Pinterest is often overlooked in many a social media strategy, but we can assure you that if you’re in the right industry and using it well, you can drive big returns on your Pinterest efforts. Like Instagram, Pinterest is highly visual, so content needs to be aesthetically pleasing first and foremost. Pinterest users engage and interact with content on the platform by uploading their own pins, pinning content from a website they love or by repinning content that is already on the platform. It’s a great platform for discovering, sharing and saving content to create moodboards around a theme, colour palette or topic.
For optimal results, Pinterest content needs to be specifically repurposed for the platform and optimized for Pinterest audiences.
Who should use it:
Pinterest is best for businesses in the following industries:
Interior, home and design space
Arts and crafts
Food and drink
Travel
Wedding and bridal
Why? The lifestyle industries above perform the best on Pinterest because they have a “how-to” and "do-it-yourself aspect, which is what many Pinterest users are specifically looking for on the platform. Consumers use Pinterest for inspiration, motivation and information, so content that adds value is crucial for engagement and success on Pinterest.
Snapchat
What you need to know:
Snapchat burst onto the social media scene last year as “the” hottest platform to be on, however, the photo sharing network itself has been around for a couple of years now. In case you don’t know, Snapchat is a platform where users can share photo and video content to their friends and followers in real time to give them a live perspective of what they’re doing. Snapchat content disappears after it is viewed, or if it is added to the user’s story, it expires after 24 hours. S
o, how big is Snapchat? 8 billion videos are viewed on Snapchat each day, and there is over 100 million (and growing) daily active users, so if these numbers are anything to go by, Snapchat is only going to continue to get bigger and better.
Who should use it?
Snapchat is fast becoming THE best way to reach 13-34 year olds, with more than 60% of smartphone users in this demographic in the US being Snapchatters, according to the social network. And the best part is, Snapchat is not limited to a particular industry or product or service offering. Everyone can tailor Snapchat to suit their business model and marketing message and support their social media marketing strategy.
So, if your target market is Millenials and Generation Z, now is the right time to jump on the Snapchat bandwagon and start sharing live, unfiltered content with your community. Have fun with it and experiment with different types of content to see what drives the most engagement. For more information on how brands can use Snapchat and what the benefits are, check out this blog post.
What you need to know:
LinkedIn is a platform for professionals to connect and network, and it is also a hub that provides access to people, jobs, news, industry updates and insights that help professionals across a wide range of industries perform better in their job. It’s a professional network with more than 400 million members across 200 countries and territories around the world, so there is a great opportunity for businesses to use LinkedIn to share industry insights and other information that is informative, educational, interesting and adds value.
Who should use it?
If your business is a business-to-business (B2B) product or service, LinkedIn is the best place to engage with your target market as users on LinkedIn are primed to hear your B2B message. Like most social media platforms, LinkedIn strategies are more effective when a media budget is available to push your content and marketing message to the right people. On LinkedIn, you can target users by industry or job role, so you can ensure the right eyeballs are on your page and content when you are investing in a paid strategy.
What you need to know:
From international news and celebrity gossip to product updates and what’s trending around the world, Twitter has you covered if you always want to be in the know. On Twitter, you can discover what is happening right now around the world and build meaningful connections with people who matter to you and your business. In just 140 characters (the maximum amount of characters allowed in a single tweet) your message is broadcast to a global audience of new and existing customers on a public forum for the digital world to see. Although, Twitter can be a blessing and a curse, so make sure you have a handle on how to use the platform effectively before you get started.
Who should use it?
Twitter is great for communicating with your customers and answering their questions, however as communication between business and consumer is so easy on Twitter, businesses can often bear the brunt of negative feedback and criticism if/when things go wrong. Twitter is best for brands and businesses that want to proactively engage with other industry leaders and be a part of the digital conversation about a topic or industry and is especially beneficial for businesses with a large media budget to invest in a paid strategy on Twitter.
So, what do you think? Are you using the right social media platforms for you and your industry? Could you do anything differently after reading this blog post?
