Social media is an ever-evolving landscape. Businesses are trying to find their place on platforms that are continuously evolving, all while staying relevant. This whirlwind of changes has made it difficult for businesses to stay on top of all the changes, let alone strategize best practices.
If you are a business looking for more business, social media is the perfect avenue. By using the right combination of networks, you can prove to your customers that you care about them and want to help them succeed. In this post I am going to look at how to use social media for your small business in 2022.
YouTube – 1.9 billion MAUs
YouTube is a video-sharing platform where users watch a billion hour of videos every day. To get started, you can create a YouTube channel for your brand where you can upload videos for your subscribers to view, like, comment, and share.
Besides being the second biggest social media site, YouTube (owned by Google) is also often known as the second largest search engine after Google. (So if you want your brand to be on YouTube, I would recommend reading up on YouTube SEO.)
Finally, you can also advertise on YouTube to increase your reach on the platform.
Facebook – 2.23 billion MAUs
Facebook is the biggest social media site around, with more than two billion people using it every month. That’s almost a third of the world’s population! There are more than 65 million businesses using Facebook Pages and more than six million advertisers actively promoting their business on Facebook, which makes it a pretty safe bet if you want to have a presence on social media.
It’s easy to get started on Facebook because almost all content format works great on Facebook — text, images, videos, live videos, and Stories. But note that the Facebook algorithm prioritizes content that sparks conversations and meaningful interactions between people, especially those from family and friends. If you want to learn more about succeeding with the updated Facebook algorithm, Brian Peters, our Strategic Partnership Marketer, shared the secrets of the new algorithm and what you can do to thrive on Facebook.
Also, remember to optimize your content for mobile as 94 percent of Facebook’s users access Facebook via the mobile app.
Facebook offers businesses a plethora of opportunities: from facebook pages to facebook ads, this social media platform has unparalleled reach. Its universal use makes it great for businesses that cater to other countries, making it an effective global lead source. Facebook also features paid ads that can target your exact audience (especially if your target audience is 55+ in a niche industry).
What you should share on Facebook: upcoming events, products, updates about sales or promotions, new services and products
How to boost your business engagement on Facebook: highlight your brand’s personality, as your posts will be mixed in with posts from your audience’s friends, family, and other interests
Visual-centric, Instagram is perfect for businesses looking to offer products or services geared toward millennials and teens. Businesses can utilize posts, stories, live, and paid ad options to reach users in a variety of different ways.
Live Streams Stories
Live streams are now becoming more popular since we have experienced the waves of the pandemic. The trends of lives, reels, and podcasts will continue into 2022 and will get more popularity. Its time to give your followers behind-the-scene insights into your business operations through live streams. With both Instagram and Facebook, customers can engage with short-lived content, like Stories. The exclusive availability of such types of content makes them particularly attractive to your followers.
Since people are getting used to work from home and enjoying content from their phones, huge platforms like trade shows are adopting live streams, which are becoming inevitably important for your business as well.
What you should share on Instagram: content that highlights your company culture, business accomplishments, client features
How to boost your business engagement on Instagram: consistently share high quality photos and videos and be authentic to your brand
For more tips on the kind of content you can share on Instagram and Facebook, check out our 2020 Social Media Holiday Calendar for B2B Businesses.
Perfect for niches and small B2B businesses, LinkedIn is great for building relationships with other businesses and professionals. While actual marketing campaigns are present on the platform, the biggest benefit small business owners see is when making text-based updates that position themselves as an industry expert, sharing videos, and connecting with others in their own industry or in their target audience.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social media app. It allows you to share a wide range of content such as photos, videos, Stories, and live videos. It has also recently launched IGTV for longer-form videos.
As a brand, you can have an Instagram business profile, which will provide you with rich analytics of your profile and posts and the ability to schedule Instagram posts using third-party tools.
To help you get started and succeed, here’s our complete guide to Instagram marketing.
What you should share on LinkedIn: recommendations, tips, your experience and core objectives, industry news
How to boost your business engagement on LinkedIn: position yourself as a valuable resource that provides insights your followers can learn from, go beyond “work” and use videos and photos that are fun to stand out from the norm
Popular among younger crowds, Twitter is great for businesses that could benefit from “going viral,” as users interact in real time and retweets can add up quickly.
What you should share on Twitter: updates about your business, recent news, etc.
How to boost your business engagement on Twitter: be playful in the way you provide value
WhatsApp – 1.5 billion MAUs
WhatsApp is a messaging app used by people in over 180 countries. Initially, WhatsApp was only used by people to communicate with their family and friends. Gradually, people started communicating with businesses via WhatsApp. (When I was in Bangkok to buy a new suit, I communicated with the tailor via WhatsApp.)
WhatsApp has been building out its business platform to allow businesses to have a proper business profile, to provide customer support, and to share updates with customers about their purchases. For small businesses, it has built the WhatsApp Business app while for medium and large businesses, there’s the WhatsApp Business API. Here are some stories of how businesses have been using WhatsApp.
Messenger – 1.3 billion MAUs
Messenger used to be a messaging feature within Facebook, and since 2011, Facebook has made Messenger into a standalone app by itself and greatly expanded on its features. Businesses can now advertise, create chatbots, send newsletters, and more on Messenger. These features have given businesses a myriad of new ways to engage and connect with their customers.
If you are thinking about using Messenger for your business, here are seven ways you can use Messenger for your marketing.
Tik Tok
Tik Tok (also known as Douyin in China) is a rising music video social network. It was the world’s most downloaded app in the first quarter of 2018, beating Facebook, Instagram, and other social media apps.
My initial impression is that it looks like Instagram for short music videos (though I’m sure it’s more than that). Users can record videos up to 60 seconds, edit them, and add music and special effects.
While it is most popular in Asia, my hunch is its popularity might spread to the west. It has recently acquired Musical.ly, a similar music video social network where 11. Sina Weibo – 392 million MAUs
Shorter Video Content
There is no doubt that videos, in any format, will rule social media marketing in 2022. Rather than long videos, the trend is shifting toward shorter content that customers love to watch to the end. By 2025, giant search engine Google expects video content to increase up to 80% of all internet traffic. As online video library is increasing, online marketers will have to prepare accurate techniques to incorporate these into their marketing mix.
QQ – 861 million MAUs
QQ is an instant messaging platform that is extremely popular among young Chinese. (It is used in 80 countries and also available in many other languages.) Besides its instant messaging features, it also enables users to decorate their avatars, watch movies, play online games, shop online, blog, and make payment.
I have to admit I don’t know much about QQ but Carrie Law from ClickZ has written a helpful brief introduction to QQ for marketers. It seems that while QQ, a desktop-native platform, used to be the top social media platform in China, WeChat, a messaging app from the same parent company, has taken over its place.
Qzone – 632 million MAUs
Qzone is another popular social networking platform based in China, where users can upload multimedia, write blogs, play games, and decorate their own virtual spaces.
According to several people on Quora, Qzone seems to be more popular among teenagers (while WeChat is more popular among adults). But the rise of mobile-based platforms like WeChat seemed to have caused a decline in popularity of desktop-based platforms like Qzone.
Conclusion
Social media marketing has a lot of power, especially when it comes to growing a business. However, it’s not always easy to know exactly what you should be posting, when you should be posting it, which platform you should use for each type of post, or how can you make sure your audience is seeing your content.