Types of social media platforms and how to find the perfect one for your brand

Social media platforms for your marketing strategy. In recent years, social media has grown exponentially, to where we almost can’t live without it. Thanks to The Global State of Digital we now know that about 3.484 million people use social media. This study comes from the hands of Hootsuite and We Are Social. From them, we can see that at least during 2020, 45% of the world population uses some kind of social media platform.

Experts expect these numbers to continue growing this year 2021. However, not only new people are starting to join social media. New brands that seek to position themselves are also becoming part of it. Because of this, some of these new accounts need to create marketing strategies for their social media. This, if they want to stand out from the competition.

In this blog, we will explain to you which are the best social media platforms. For this, we will take into account your type of business. We will also explain how you can use them properly to attract new followers and potential customers.

What is a social media platform?

Many of us have already used social media and still use it. These are digital platforms that aim at creating communities with people who share the same interests.

Most times, these people already know each other in real life. They may be friends, family, classmates, and co-workers, etc. Thus, social media promotes an alternative to get in touch with people.

However, social media users don’t have to know each other to connect on the same platform.

They just need to share the same tastes. This way people anywhere in the world get in touch and start interacting.

Types of social media platforms

Today there are two types of social media platforms:

Horizontal or generic social media platforms:

These are platforms whose main theme is not clear. They seek the union and participation of users around the world.

All this without discriminating against their interests. Because of this, they are a great way to talk with other people. Through them, users can share information, offer entertainment and leisure. Some of the most popular platforms related to this are Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Vertical social networks:

These, unlike other types of platforms, are those that relate to people with the same interests.

For example, music, photography, and gastronomy among others. An example of them is LinkedIn.

This platform focuses on those people who share the same work environment.

Flickr is also another platform that focuses on users whose passion is photography.

Advantages of social media platforms

All social media platforms have benefits and disadvantages. However, their cons have more to do with personal accounts rather than business ones. That’s why today we will show you the pros of social media as part of your marketing strategy.

They are immediate:

Social media platforms work in real-time. As a result, every piece of information shared by all users’ moves very quickly without anyone noticing it. In just a second you can make a funny comment and then in the next it will be viral all over the world. Another important point is that for companies, this factor is an important benefit. This is because thanks to it, they can know if their followers like their content or not.

They are massive:

Social media has the characteristic of allowing users to reach thousands not matter where they are in the world of tastes. What’s important is to grab the attention of new people who might like your content or products. Then, you must focus on turning them into your loyal followers.

Increase the visibility of brands:

Many social media platforms have created new updates focused on advertising. Thanks to them brands have been able to improve their visibility. That is, people are now more aware of them. Besides, this also allows them to improve the impression they leave on users. All this because tasks such as customer service are now easier and more customized.

They allow to share relevant information:

For your followers, this is very important. Users like the kind of content that manages to entertain them or offer important information. For example, videos, texts, and images among others. These are what will really grab the attention of your target audience to your brand.

Importance of advertising on social media

The importance of social media advertising lies in its ability to reach new clients and create more sales.

Added to this is the fact that it allows you to enhance your organic content once you know them.

Here we will show you how important is having social media as part of your marketing strategy.

• It allows notoriety in the long and short term.
• You have options to perform micro segmentations.
• It enhances the branding of brands and personnel.
• Metrics allow you to measure and analyze how the brand is doing in terms of interaction and engagement.
• The convergence of digital media should be considered to achieve a greater reach of your promotional actions.
• You can carry out a marketing strategy by implementing various platforms to reach new audiences.

To create a good social media strategy you must take into account the most important algorithms. These are what will allow you to improve your reach on different platforms. Besides, this also offers you an increase in your account engagement.

The benefits and workings of each social media platform

Facebook

As the most popular platform, it has the largest number of users. Besides, this also your best option to ensure the success of your marketing strategy.

Facebook offers you the best options to reach your audience through posts and paid ads.

With it, you can share photos, videos music, opinions and reach out to your followers.

Because of this, Facebook is perfect to share information, as well as motivational and funny content.

Why use Facebook?

It provides visibility:

With this platform, you can gain new visits from potential followers interested in your products or services.

Brand image:

By creating a Facebook business account you can easily see how your followers perceive your brand. This way you can study how your content spreads among users.

Easy dissemination:

This platform has a lot of active members, near 1 and a half million people. This means that is a great channel to advertise and promote your brand. Not only that but thanks to it you can also let people know about products and services much easier.

Conversation:

One of the most important elements that every platform seeks to reach is finding a way to encourage conversation.

Customer service:

The functions that you will find on this platform to create relationships will also offer you a great service to help your clients.

Cost reduction:

By using a free platform as a marketing strategy, you will lower your advertising costs. This is thanks to the fact that digital advertising isn’t as expensive as other traditional forms of advertising.

Instagram

One of the most popular in recent years among the young and millennial public.

In this platform, most of its users share their daily lives as part of their routines and their ways of living each day.

Instagram now has over 15 million business profiles. Besides, at least 60% of users discover new products daily on it.

That’s why this platform is ideal to publicize new services or products through posts or stories.

Why use Instagram?

• It gives you real-time results on the performance of stories and posts throughout the day. For this, this platform offers you metrics. These allow you to know how the interactions are going in your post.
• It lets you know the number of people who click on the links in your description of your company. This can boost traffic to your website or online store.
• Its large database, also collected from Facebook, allows you to use that information for advertising. This also has high targeting power to offer your users custom ads for their tastes.
• The use of images is a strong component. If you want to tell stories through images this is perfect. Another important element is that this platform allows you to be creative for your branding. This way you can explain the values ​​of your brand in the images’ description.
• It’s a great platform for personal brands and branding of creative companies. Its feature to share images and stories make Instagram the best option to let your imagination run wild.

TikTok

Created in the Asian continent, this is a very famous platform among the younger generation. It allows users to share up to 60 seconds long videos with music or dialogues.

On the other hand, its fame comes from its ability to create short and creative videos.

TikTok is a social media platform that has been involved in the eye of the hurricane due to different criticisms and complaints. All of them about its security regulations. However, it remains a great platform to promote brands and new products for its way of storytelling. Besides, a favorite type of content on it is comedy videos and a lot of humor.

Why use Tik Tok?

TikTok is gaining a lot of fame and becoming more brand-friendly. For example, users used to not be able to add a link to their biography, nor could brands run advertising campaigns. Because of this, this platform used to only work for branding and business visibility. However, it didn’t allow brands to grab the attention of customers.

Today, both are possible and now you can get the most out of using TikTok for business. On one hand, the link in the biography allows you to drive traffic to your business website. This way you can convert potential customers into real customers.

On the other hand, through Tik Tok Ads you can set up ads for your brand. This way you can enhance your conversion strategies. In fact, the platform is going further and is now experimenting with the incorporation of the “shop now” button in tiktoker videos.

Another important aspect of using TikTok for companies is that its niche market is mostly young people. In this sense, its age range is between 16 and 24 years of age, or in other words, Generation Z. It’s important to remember that this generation will have the greatest purchasing power in the coming years. Thus, being able to grab their attention from now is an investment with almost ensured long-term benefits. All of this depends on the nature of each business.

In this sense, we must highlight that the level of engagement reached by posts on TikTok is quite high. Also, it isn’t saturated with advertisements yet, nor are there many companies with registered profiles. As a result, there isn’t yet a lot of competition remains. All this context makes right now the ideal time to start using TikTok for business.

Twitter

This is one of the 10 most visited social media platforms in the world.

Twitter is known for being an ideal platform for sharing short texts of no more than 240 characters. Thus, it’s perfect for news sites or mini-blogs.

Twitter is a platform known for its followers of strong and volatile opinions.

Many brands use this platform to give small advances to their products or to promote their services. Others prefer to recount their development and success stories early on.

Why use Twitter?

To advertise you have Twitter Ads and Twitter Cards

One of the main advantages that Twitter has is paid ads that allow you to segment your followers based on their behavior within the platform. Besides, it groups your content consumers according to their interests. This works as a great strategy to get new followers and redirect them to your website to gain more traffic.

Another extra element is Twitter Cards. These are “cards” loaded with additional information within the platform. With this, your follower will be able to know much more about you without the need to leave the platform. The cards give you an element of greater interaction with the user. This is because by not having to leave the platform to learn more about your business, they spend more time looking at your profile.

Share the content you produce and news

We know that this platform is known par excellence as the ideal one for people to only read and comment on events.

Thus, if your brand has a blog or is a personal brand, this is the right social media platform for you. Here you can share content about what happens every day in an interesting way.

Added to this you can also follow up with companies and their projects.

It’s one of the best platforms to share your progress on the products or content you produce and keep up to date with news and trends in the world.

Easy adhesion

Thanks to its limitation of short texts, users are more comfortable spending hours checking it.

This way they can learn the most important information in just a few words.

On the other hand, another attractive element for your followers is the use of videos of up to 2 minutes.

You build relationships easily

Twitter also allows your brand to create a strong relationship with your users. Users find it very comfortable the fact that they only need to write your @ to tag you.

On the other hand, they can also easily message you in private.

As a result, this allows you to communicate with your followers at once and add new users if needed. Besides, it’s great for building a link between your followers with other potential stakeholders. Thus, when a person likes your tweet, that person’s followers will see it and maybe like you.

Ideal for business branding

You can create your tone of voice to present yourself to your followers in a closer and more relaxed way. This in comparison to other platforms. On Twitter, the creation of branding as a form of self-promotion gives room for new ways to reach the public. This way you can create a unique personality to connect with your target audience.

Easy monitoring of metrics

The help of the Twitter analytics tool allows you to know what the thoughts of the followers about your brand are. For this, all you have to do is check the statistics of the interaction on your website. Don’t forget that you can post daily on this platform, but if you don’t get high interactions it’s because they are not working. With this monitoring tool, knowing which are the weak points of your account and which are the content that does work helps you to enhance it a lot more.

LinkedIn

This is one of the latest platforms to join the world of social media. However, it already has over 433 million users in over 200 countries.

LinkedIn is a professional platform that seeks to unite people with the same field, careers, and goals. Added to this, it’s also an excellent tool to promote work connections between companies and workers.

LinkedIn is perfect for your company if you want to make it known as a company focused on the professional growth of its staff. In it, you can also share your company’s achievements. For example, articles, press releases, awards or simply share its growth.

Why use LinkedIn?

You will gain a presence on Google

This platform has the characteristic of being able to redirect users who follow you from your profile to your website.

This will bring more traffic to your page and Google will reward this increase in visitors to your website.

By gaining a presence in Google, it’s more likely that your website will be positioned among the first links of the search engine. For this, you must keep both your LinkedIn account and your online site optimized and up-to-date.

It empowers your brand

Social media platforms have more and more business accounts every day. As a result, this increases the number of competition that your business can have. By having a LinkedIn account, your business will have another platform on which to support itself and show a new facet. This allowing you to add new added values ​​to your brand.

You will find partners

As we mentioned previously, this is a platform for professionals. That’s why you will be able to connect with professionals or ideal personalities to promote your business. These will give your brand more credibility if you seek the support of partners who are experts in the area where you need more promotion.

Get new clients

You will get new quality clients interested in your company. LinkedIn is the perfect platform for carrying out B2b business, that is, business to business. This by giving you new interested clients interested in your business either to buy your products or services or to make alliances.

Cutting edge information

This platform’s contents are very innovative and it aims at keeping the user information updated. Besides, for your marketing strategy, you can add relevant content on business topics or new knowledge within the work or business world. This way you will be able to grab the attention of your followers.

YouTube

This is the second most visited site in the world after Google. Created in 2005, this platform has had unstoppable growth as a social media and entertainment platform for users. Although YouTube has been growing in recent years, the growth of its number of users and accounts won’t stop any time soon.

YouTube is a digital platform in which its users can share videos of all kinds. They can be about music, entertainment, tutorials, classes, talks, or comedy. On the other hand, its audience is, for the most part, young, especially Millennials.

This social network is ideal for promoting audiovisual campaigns and sharing extra content that is too long for other platforms.

Why use YouTube?

• They allow you to attract customers who have similar interests related to your business.
• It’s a way to promote your products or services in a creative and fun way.
• With the help of tags and video locations, you can attract people close to your location.
• It’s one of the platforms with the highest number of active members. This means that your business can reach many more people in the world.
• It helps you create content for your other channels. The videos from your YouTube channel can be used within your website or social media. This will also attract people to these other channels.
• Encourage relationships between brands or influencers. These are people with a huge following how can then become the spokespersons for your brand. For this, they can show themselves as customers of your services or try your products for the first time in a video. This is ideal to create real reviews of your brand and win the potential customers you may have.

Other reasons to use YouTube

• Use the power of streaming. Streaming allows users to watch videos without the need to download them. This element has made YouTube what it’s today, a video giant.
• Take in your favor the live broadcasts that you can do of your brand. This is ideal for your business events or the prelaunch of a new product. You can also offer special shows through your YouTube account as a way to promote this new channel and then redirect them to others.
• It is accessible from any device. It doesn’t matter if the behaviors of your users are more than checking YouTube from their computers, this platform adapts to it. If, on the other hand, they spend more time on YouTube from their mobile devices, this app also adapts to them. This allows you to have your content everywhere.

Extra support for your marketing strategy

Google my business

This is a Google tool that aims at helping businesses manage their online presence. It allows you to join and link your business with the place where it’s located.

As a result, this encourages local purchase sales. It also helps you add new information related to your business. For example, who you are, what your goals are, what you do, among others.

The main goal of this tool is to attract greater visibility to your business. This way you will allow your customers to easily find you. Google My Business brings together different tools that are useful for your business if you have a physical store or office.

Why use Google My Business?

Positioning in Google

We know the importance of showing up among the top positions on the Google search engine page. This is also very important in physical store businesses. Thus, Google My Business is ideal to help you with geo-positioning. If a person looks for a business in the same area where your store or office is located, you will be among the first results. This means that you will be one of the first companies to stand out for your client regardless of which device they are browsing from.

This is a business tool that works with the help of Google Maps. As a result, it tells the user where the company is located and how to get there. On the other hand, it also shows your numbers and contact information and the score that your online business has.

Offer information about your key business to the potential client

This point is related to the previous one. As we said before, Google My Business allows you to offer valuable information to your customers. For example,

• Where you are
• How to get there
• Your contact information
• Your office hours
• When you’re open to the public

It also offers a link to your website and your customer service numbers if they need them.

Create promotions for special dates

For a lot of brands, holidays are a great opportunity to increase their sales. With Google My Business, you can offer local promotions during these dates. On the other hand, you can also offer important information about the days your business will remain open on these dates. Added to this, you can give your clients up-to-date brand information.

Better positioning with Google My Business

Searching for local businesses can help you move up on Google’s search results list. Thanks to this tool, you can take advantage of different marketing opportunities. Added to this is the ability to create localized backlinks. As a result, this together with your client’s good reviews will help you grow your brand and position yourself.

Information of value for your business

Google My business as another important Google tool, has many interconnected benefits that add a lot of value to your business. This will help you know the statistics and data about the behavior of your customers. Here you will know how they found your website or your social media, what are the keywords that helped them find you, and what is the performance of your website.

Relevant data such as clicks, bounce rate, and other types of analytics will help you master your digital strategies. Besides, you will also find out who are the people who are looking for you, what is your age range, gender, and any other data that will help you boost your business and obtain a high return on investment (also known as ROI).

How to choose a social media platform for your company?

Choosing which of these social media platforms is right for your business can be a bit complicated. However, marketing experts say that it’s best to make a strategy that uses several of these social platforms to enhance your brand in every way. Next, we explain some steps that you should consider to know which of these platforms the best is for you.

Study each social media platform

In this blog, we explained what each platform is for and what their functionalities are. This, together with the description of your business, the products it sells, and the people to whom they are directed, may be good indicators to know which the right social media platform is for you.

This also depends on what your goals are for each platform and what you plan to achieve when implementing them.

Meet your target person

Who is your audience? What are your online habits? In which social media platform are they on?

These are questions that you should ask yourself before starting to work on social media.

The person to whom you want to sell, either a product, a service, or a whole lifestyle, will be your research guide to what they want, what they like, and how they spend their free time.

All this information will be of great help to choose a social media platform.

Keep an eye on the competition

Your business is not the only one that exists, you will always have competition.

What’s important here is to investigate what they do on their social media, how they target their followers, and how they plan to attract them.

You must watch what the competition’s strategy is to offer something relevant to your customers.

Succeed where your competition fails, offer what they lack, and always pay attention to our client’s needs.

Think about logistics

This is a very common mistake among brands that are just starting. They think that they should be on every social media platform to reach more audiences. However, it’s about having active platforms that adjust to what your customers really want to see.

It’s better to be part of two platforms and have a solid strategy with good marketing, excellent content, and good interaction with your users than to be part of every platform and not offer good content or leave them out of date. Social media platforms. The best thing is that you find out which are the platforms that your client uses the most and focus on them. If in the future you see a market opportunity on other platforms, start venturing into them without losing your quality of content and consistency.

BluCactus, your ally in Digital marketing

BluCactus international marketing agency serves clients all over the world. Our specialty? The creation of web designs and SEO positioning in online searches. Social media platforms. Besides, our group of experts is dedicated to helping businesses and brands succeed in one of the most competitive sectors in the market, the digital world.

BluCactus will accompany you every step that your brand takes. This goes from the creation of the branding of your business to the creation of content. Our focus is on supporting you with the development of your website or the administration of your accounts on social media.

This online marketing agency, based in Dallas, TX, seeks to strengthen your image as a brand and take it to the next level. Don’t wait any longer to have the help of the best specialists in digital marketing and contact us through our social media or website.

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