The Marketer’s Guide to Social Media Platforms

When many think of the internet, they immediately default to social media. And for a good reason. Not only does it seem like a new social media platform is emerging every second, but the amount of time and users that they acquire is nothing short of impressive.

What’s the most appealing factor to marketers that these social media platforms accomplish more than any other vehicle on the internet? Attention. Attention is the flash in the pan that marketers flock to.

The more users and daily views, the bigger the opportunity to reach your target demographic to sell your product or service. But with so many social media platforms to market it on, which one(s) are right for your business goals.

Here is a breakdown of the most popular social media platforms and the marketing opportunities they provide.

Facebook

If this is your first time hearing about Facebook, then you may be in the running for the worst marketer award. Facebook’s incredible growth and innovation have accomplished leaps and bounds for a relatively young company.

With over 1.79 billion active users, there’s no doubt your target audience is on Facebook What makes Facebook such a crucial tool is their innovation; they continually develop tools for both the users (Facebook Live, 360 photos and video, Messenger) along with marketers (various types of ads, retargeting tools, and analytics reporting with custom events).

As users of Facebook consistently offer more data to Facebook (brands they engage with, favorite books, movies, companies, types of a post they engage with, tools used), Facebook will continue to innovate products to help reach your business goals.

Twitter

Twitter is grouped in with Facebook as one of the original “darlings” of social media. Created in 2006, Twitter emerged as a micro-blogging platform that allowed you to share your thoughts in 140 characters or less.

While Twitter grew immensely from the time of conception, it remained a mystery to many how it worked or how it compared to Facebook. As for demographics, Twitter is far behind in Facebook’s available data and the overall pattern of users.

Twitter has now emerged into a speedy provider of real-time updates, and a great place for B2C.

Instagram

Created in 2010, Instagram is a go-to option for teens and millennials. Strictly focused on visuals (photos and videos), Instagram provides a wealth of opportunity for marketers targeting a younger demographic that engages frequently.

While Facebook saw primary engagement and active time on the platform with image sharing, Instagram focused solely on images by catering to a mobile-only platform with easy-to-user filters to make pictures visually appealing.

With exponential growth, Facebook quickly took notice and purchased Instagram for 1 billion dollars. Instagram still operates exclusively from Facebook but has all the features of Facebook ads, which makes it one of the most promising social media platforms for brand awareness and engagement.

Pinterest

If your ideal customer is Female, Pinterest should be your number one focus. Known for its visual boards, users of Pinterest create online “boards” that contain individual “pins.”

Ideal for recipes, crafts, and interior designs, each pin can contain a clickable URL directly to a website or eCommerce product.

Because Pinterest provides an almost “visual search engine,” it has become the 2nd largest social media platform for referral traffic, and its ad platform is coming along.

They have recently installed a “Buy” call-to-action button that should increase its potential for eCommerce ad spending.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is technically older than Facebook, but the two platforms are completely different in goals. LinkedIn is the central hub for business professionals, which allows each user to display their professional achievements, places of employment, and business networking.

While LinkedIn provides an immense opportunity for thought leadership and B2B lead generation, it absolutely will not suffice for B2C (business to consumer) eCommerce.

LinkedIn provides the opportunity to be a thought leader by allowing an internal blog posting platform that you can create content that will be viewed on the platform but requires a large time commitment and multiple posts of content to be seen.

Snapchat

Snapchat is all the rage these days with a dynamic platform that originally was a head-scratcher for marketers. How could you justify marketing success with a message that automatically deletes itself after viewing?

Initially, Snapchat seemed like a cool and fun platform for users but had little marketing value. Fast forward a few years, and it seems like Snapchat is mentioned in every marketing blog!

While there are few ways to track the success of snaps and has a huge learning curve for older users, the platform attracts serious content creators and is great for daily engagement and brand awareness.

Starting a brand profile is free, and you’ll have to use your other social media communities to build a user base for Snapchat.Snapchat’s ad platform first rolled out to global brands only, attracting brands like ESPN, The Food Network, Comedy Central, and People Magazine, but have recently started to expand to small businesses.

You can now create geo-targeted filters that can assist in awareness to local businesses, events, conferences, etc.

Snapchat is evolving every day with their technology and appealing to users in a different way to engage. They recently released Spectacles, which is a pair of sunglasses that allows you to post directly to your Snap account, like Google Glass but in a much more authentic way.

Also, Snapchat has partnered with Uber to create custom filters for users as they travel. The opportunities are endless for what Snapchat can do, and it will be exciting to see how they can better the platform for marketers alike.

Reddit

Known as “The Front Page of the Internet” Reddit is simple in its design and functionality. Reddit is a discussion board style social media platform that allows users to post submissions that can be original content, links, or a combination of the two.

These posts can be “upvoted” and the most upvoted links or comments will be brought to the top of the conversation. Reddit is massive for referral traffic, and allows a unique opportunity to engage a specific audience with your content.

As of recently, community moderators have become stricter when a new user just posts a link to a specific conversation without valuable contribution to the conversation at hand.

The Reddit community is very passionate and favors a social media platform that brings insightful comments and contribution. It’s ad platform is very simple in nature, but also allows to target a very niche and passionate user base.

“Attention is the flash in the pan that marketers flock to.”

Be the Smart Marketer

While these breakdowns of each social media platform give you the “nuts and bolts” of what each provides to a marketer, spend the necessary time to research your potential customer, how they engage within the platform, and identify pain points and the proper verbiage to helping your customer.

You will more likely succeed in your marketing efforts, and be far more successful in building an online community that values your company and the way you engage with them.