The best social media platform for you will depend on your specific marketing needs and goals. Whether you are a veteran social media marketer, a marketer looking to go into social media marketing, or a business owner looking to leverage social media to increase conversion and sales, it’s helpful to know the most powerful social media platforms around.
This knowledge will allow you to maximize your brand reach on social media, engage with the right audience, and score your social media marketing goals.
Social Media Promotion is an integral part of any brand planning to get visits via the Internet.
Choosing the social media platform which matches your business type and aligns with your business goals is an important decision.
But how do you make the best choice when there are pools of options of social media platforms out there to pick from?
If you are not careful, these so many options will drive you into a choice paralysis situation as having more options to consider drains our mental energy more quickly.
If this is currently your dilemma, then read on because this article is written with you in mind to help you in deciding the social media platform for your brand as I will tell you the 4 most powerful social media platforms for brands to leverage in their social media campaigns.
What Are The 4 Powerful Social Media Platforms For Brands?
#1. Facebook
Facebook does have some redeeming qualities for a brand. Facebook is one of the most effective ways to leverage social media for your business.
This social media platform continues to be the reigning champion of social media channels, as the #1 spot where friends connect and interact online.
More than just a meeting place for friends, this platform has grown into a venue for brands to market themselves through interaction with customers and self-promotion.
Whether you are a big corporation or a small local business, Facebook is a powerful marketing tool, it provides great space to keep customers informed, develop brand identity and awareness, and broaden your reach.
Below are a few ways you can use Facebook for marketing your brand.
#1. Facebook Can Help Promote Your Online Brand.
Your online presence is more important now than it has ever been as consumer interest in mobile and social media shopping continues to grow, and Facebook may be your best place to get in front of customers near and far.
According to Statista, Facebook has over 2.9 billion monthly users; no other social network can offer your brand such a level of potential exposure.
As the largest and first social media platform to achieve mainstream success, Facebook provides the most integration tools compared to other platforms, including follow buttons, photo sharing, and account logins.
These tools can lead customers back to your brand website and other online content you want to highlight.
#2. Facebook Forms Professional Connection Between Competitors.
One of Facebook’s overarching goals is bonding people, whether it’s old friends, current relationships, or those looking to meet new people.
While not every engagement on Facebook is beneficial, there are specific instances when its sheer number of users can be beneficial to brands.
#3. Alignment with Both B2B and B2C Brand
Have you heard that Facebook advertising is only for B2C brands?
Prepare to be surprised at how B2B brands can also run successful campaigns using Facebook.
#4. Full-Funnel Targeting with Various Forms of Engagement
Of all social platforms, Facebook is perhaps the only one that successfully caters to users at any stage of their engagement journey through the funnel.
Facebook’s targeting options, ad formats, and measurement capabilities agree well with any marketing strategy.
It is useful whether a prospect is in the proverbial upper funnel stages, casually browsing and just starting their research, or at the stage to decide a transaction.
#5. Drive Traffic Directly to Your Website
Facebook’s ad options enable driving referral traffic to your brand`s website.
Most people indeed open Facebook with the intent of staying there to browse its content.
However, if your ad is compelling and targeting is highly relevant, the ad will be sufficiently enticing for the user to leave Facebook and reach your website.
These and more reasons make Facebook a powerful social media platform for brands.
#2. YouTube
Now I know everyone has heard of YouTube and so it is needless to say it’s the best place to upload, share, discover, and watch great videos.
When you are trying to promote a brand, video is the way to go.
Let’s face it, we all love video. We love to go to the movies, we love watching the videos users post on Facebook
we love going down rabbit holes on YouTube need I say more? We do all of these because a video is compelling.
It’s like we can’t help ourselves but always crave video content to consume. How many times have you watched the video of the hamster eating a carrot? More times than you are willing to admit.
When people love video as much as that, it’s worth considering video as part of a marketing strategy.
And, of course, by a video here, we mean YouTube. If you haven’t yet made YouTube marketing part of your overall plan, read on for some reasons you should consider YouTube marketing.
#1. Marketing on YouTube Will Help You Get Discovered On Google
YouTube – helps you get discovered on Google in searches
Due to Google Universal Search, videos, news, images, books, and local searches are blended into Google’s search results, to offer the most useful information for people searching.
You might have noticed that video content appears more often in Google’s search results. This evidence that Google considers video to be as important as text-only content.
You can take advantage of this by writing high-quality articles on your website and creating supporting videos on YouTube.
Doing this will build backlinks to your website, meaning you get found on Google more often by users searching.
By leveraging YouTube as part of your marketing strategy for your brand, you are also improving the authority of your website.
The more authoritative your site is in Google’s eyes, the better all your pages will rank in the search results.
#2. On YouTube, Your Content Never Dies
Leveraging YouTube for business can help you to re-purpose content you have already created without the need to spend a lot of time or invest in expensive equipment.
Re-purposing content you have already created is an effective form of content marketing, as you can reach an audience that will love that particular type of content.
This approach allows you to create at least 4 pieces of content from just an idea, resulting in an engaged audience who can easily digest the message you provide for them.
#3. Grow Your Audience Globally
This is one of the biggest benefits of leveraging YouTube for brands.
Consistently creating video content opens new doors to new visitors who would never come across your brand any other way.
Through YouTube, you can reach a global audience even if you only speak one language.
If you are a native English speaker, you are at an advantage, as it’s challenging to capture the huge English-speaking markets if you can’t write or produce excellent content.
In addition to this, if you incorporate closed captions on your videos, you can also reach new people as you are catering to people with different needs.
Research now reveals that videos with closed captions receive 4% more views and subscribers than those without, this should serve as an inspiration to you.
#4. Your Target Audience Will Promote You and Buy from You
Videos with a personal touch help boost conversions. People buy from those they trust, and that trust is earned by relating to them on an emotional level.
Research now reveals that, for professional services and general brands, if you are driving traffic to a landing page with a video of a person in the company speaking about the product, it can dramatically improve your list of leads and sales.
#3. Instagram
Instagram isn’t just a platform for sharing photos and videos that will make your friends envious of your breathtaking life. It’s also a powerful marketing tool for brands.
One billion people use Instagram globally each month. Of those one billion people, 9 in 10 follow a brand on Instagram.
This means your brand has the potential to reach 900 million people on this visual-focused social media platform.
If you are not sure how Instagram can help your brand, tell see the answer below:
#1. Purchasing Power
Did you know that over ⅓ of users on Instagram have used the platform to purchase a product online?
With the sales power that Instagram has, you don’t want your brand to miss out on this platform.
At the end of the day, sales are what most business owners crave, and it’s no different when it comes to the benefits of marketing on Instagram.
Sales guide the bottom line, and trying to learn how to boost sales is probably the main reason you are reading this article.
It’s important to know that what you are investing in is worth it.
Let’s take a look at some of the facts about Instagram.
Over ⅓ of users have used the platform to purchase a product online, making them 70% more likely to do so than non-Instagram users.
Now, let’s break these stats down a little bit.
We mentioned earlier that there are over 1 billion monthly active users on Instagram, right?
So ⅓ of them would mean at least 333,333,333 Instagram users have leveraged Instagram to purchase a product online.
#2. Quality Brand Building
One of the beauties of using Instagram marketing is that it has all of the paid advertising capabilities of Facebook.
But it has something more to it than Facebook does: organic functionality.
When we refer to organic functions, we mean the actions you can perform or results that you can achieve without having to pay for them in advertising dollars.
On Facebook, if you want to build the number of fans that your business page has, you have to pay for them with Facebook ads.
On Instagram, you can build your list organically.
This helps for a very natural relationship to occur between your brand and your fans from the start as opposed to forcing the connection with paid ads.
It’s like a grassroots movement that takes impact where the more followers you have, the more others want to follow you.
That organic, word-of-mouth type follower growth is invaluable, especially for newer brands.
In addition to whatever efforts you put forth into building your fan base, 50% of Instagrammers follow brands anyway
This means that half of the 1 million people on the Instagram platform are more likely to follow your brand just for being on Instagram.
#3. Visual Appeal
One of the key benefits of Instagram that separates it from all other social media channels is that it’s photo-centric.
Unlike other social media platforms, Instagram is comprised solely of photos and videos that can be accompanied by text.
This is beneficial to your brand because most people remember more of what they see than what they read or hear.
Additionally, videos tend to outmatch images on social media when it comes to engagement and results.
But both videos and images outrun social media posts without either.
This instantly gives Instagram the leg up on other social media sites that don’t require one of the two to post.
Having a video-centric or photo platform allows your followers to remember your brand betters, and it makes them more likely to engage with your brand and content.
#4. Whatsapp
WhatsApp is a social messaging app used by people in over 180 countries. Initially, people originally used WhatsApp to send text messages to their friends. Gradually, people started communicating with brands via WhatsApp.
WhatsApp’s business platform allows brands to provide customer support and share updates with customers about their purchases. For small brands, there’s the WhatsApp Business app, while enterprise brands can use the WhatsApp Business API.
As the most widely leveraged social messaging platform, WhatsApp can be a powerful customer service platform for your brand.
If are still not convinced about why you should leverage WhatsApp for your brand advertising, continue to read.
#1. Reach and convenience
According to WhatsApp, 30% of marketers send 4-5 emails per week. Customers are bombarded with promotional emails, leading to low marketing email open rates and low brand engagement.
WhatsApp is the world’s most popular chat platform with over 2 billion users. It offers brands the visibility and reach they need to see success in their marketing campaigns.
With a 95% open rate, sending marketing messages over WhatsApp ensures you can bond and connect with customers and scale your messages as you grow.
#2. A highly engaging digital platform
WhatsApp Business messaging allows brands to collect and analyze valuable consumer information. Its features allow brands to:
#1. Ask direct questions to their customers and measure preferences
#2. Send quick surveys and polls to get a better understanding of the demand for products, items, and more
#3. Respond to customers` queries in a more personal way
#3. Supports automation
WhatsApp Business enables brands to deliver faster customer service. When customers are opt-in, brands can directly contact users on their phones.
This is significant when considering that 56% of people would rather contact customer services through messaging than over the phone.
The quick replies function on WhatsApp Business allows brands to store and reuse relevant and frequently sent messages to speed up the customer service process.
This is convenient for so many industries and their customer needs when it comes to instant replies.
Consider the need for reactive replies to flight times, bank transactions, and delivery and booking confirmations.
It is more efficient to build a response from a template instead of from scratch every time.
Brands can also use automation by setting up away messages during slow periods when it’s not possible to respond.
This way, your customers feel informed; they know when to expect a response, and as a brand, it provides the opportunity to keep the customer satisfied.
#4. Reach all demographics
Customers are more likely to contact and engage with brands that are using their preferred platform. Although WhatsApp is mostly used by younger age persons, the functionality of the platform makes it accessible to a wide age range.
Businesses are fighting for customers’ attention and brands that can’t keep up risk being ignored. WhatsApp offers customers an instant and engaging platform to actively engage with brands in real time.
Generation Z was brought up relying on technology, and as customers they expect personalized communication from brands especially online and through mobile.
When used well, WhatsApp enables brands to execute this kind of service perfectly. Expectedly, customer voices are easily heard.
Conclusion
Are you looking for the best social media platforms for brands so you can work on your social strategy and rake in a larger ROI?
Social media can be one of your brand`s most profitable marketing platforms. As you must have known, social media is an excellent way to build brand awareness, bond with existing customers, and generate new leads to fill your sales funnel.
But with over 65 social media platforms out there, which one will give your brand the most bang for your buck?
To ease the stress of trying to choose from these 65 platforms, this article has outlined the 4 most powerful social media platforms for brands.
