What’s the best social media marketing platform for your business? We researched and compared the top social media platforms for business to help you choose which one is best for your brand.
We research and compare the best social media platforms for your business. This report will teach you about each platform, their core value and how you can use each to drive traffic, leads and conversions for your business.
Monthly active users: 2.7 billion
Best use: Engaging your audience, collecting reviews, customer service, advertising
Facebook is often the first social media site to come to mind when discussing social media, and for good reason. It’s one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, and it was one of the first to provide advertising options to businesses.
A Facebook business page is a must for any company or brand, and you should update yours on a regular basis. Today’s consumers expect all businesses to have a presence on the platform, and many of them also expect those businesses to respond to their questions and concerns.
Basically, if you’re only going to choose one platform for your business to use, make it Facebook.
Average monetizable daily active users: 186 million
Best use: Building industry authority, real-Life updates
Twitter is a fast-paced platform, and many users seek news and information on it. Because of this, it can be especially beneficial for companies who publish original content on a regular basis.
Sharing links to new pages and blog posts is simple, and doing it regularly sends readers directly to your new content. Plus, if you make it part of your strategy to share useful and informative content from other sources, you can build your reputation as an authority in your industry.
Registered users: Over 706 million
Best use: Reaching B2B prospects and potential employees
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals, meaning it can be a useful tool for reaching B2B prospects. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful for B2C companies as well.
If your company is hiring, maintaining an active LinkedIn account can help potential applicants learn about your job openings. And if you share updates about your company and employees, you can show them what it’s like to work at your business.
YouTube
Registered users: Over 2 billion
Best use: Highlighting company culture, tutorials, demonstrations
Although you may not think of it as social media, YouTube is one of the largest sources of user-generated content online. And if your company creates its own content, it can be a great way to connect with those users.
In addition to the views you get directly on the platform, you can also use YouTube to host videos to embed on your site. And considering how effective visual content is in engaging site visitors, this alone is reason enough to create an account.
Falcon
Falcon is a social media marketing platform that offers a 14-day free trial of its Essentials plan (targeting single users and small teams) and suggests larger companies with multiple teams and markets request a demo of the Full suite. It offers weekly training sessions and real-time in-app chat, email, and telephone service. Falcon offers dedicated support on your daily workflows or social media strategy.
Key Features
- A content calendar and campaign planner
- Advanced analytics dashboards
- Community management and in-app support
- Social media advertising and competitor benchmark (Full Suite only)
ContentCal
Although ContentCal initially began as a social media marketing agency and then developed a platform focusing on scheduling and publishing, it has since extended its focus to planning, collaborating, analyzing, and storing content. It includes in-built approval flows to help streamline the process and avoid bottlenecks. It is affordable, with plans ranging from $37/mo or $30/mo when billed annually.
Key Features
- It has a visual calendar to plan, create, and share marketing content
- You can create template posts, save ideas, and store images, media, and links in one central content hub
- Automatically publish your content to multiple platforms at your chosen time and date
Brand24
It is another brand reputation management tool that is specifically designed to work with social networks. Brand24 tracks your brand mention on social networking websites, notifies you immediately, and lets you analyze how satisfied your customers are.
Key Features
- It is a powerful tool suitable for teams.
- It monitors sentiment analysis.
- You can measure customer satisfaction with Brand24 too.
Tiktok.
Although a relatively newer player in the social advertising game, TikTok holds huge potential for reaching potential customers, especially younger audiences.
According to eMarketer, many of TikTok’s social commerce capabilities have primarily focused on product ads which appear as native videos on users’ “For You” feeds. The ads are full-screen and appear for nine seconds, just like an organic TikTok post. Under each advertisement, users can tap the “Shop Now” button, which brings them directly to the merchant’s ecommerce site to complete their checkout.
Besides in-feed ads, other ad options on TikTok include Brand Takeovers, which means that your ad will be displayed as soon as a user opens the app, or a Branded Hashtag Challenge, which encourages user-generated content through trending hashtags and fun video challenges, like a popular dance or creative filter.
Pinterest.
Like Instagram, Pinterest is a highly visual platform, decorated with whimsical wedding photos, cooking videos and fashion reels. But with that being said, Pinterest is largely geared toward women with a 71% female user base.
Considering Pinterest users intentionally use the platform to find and purchase products, Pinterest is one of the most ideal platforms for social media advertising. Promoted pins easily blend into the Pinterest boards without distracting users like some other platforms do. In fact, 85% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on Pins they see from brands.
Especially beneficial for ecommerce retailers, Pinterest has a highly targeted search engine which allows brands to advertise their products by promoting their highest-performing pins.
Linkedin.
As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn holds a large professional user base and is able to target customers based on job qualifications. Thus, LinkedIn advertising is largely geared toward a corporate audience.
Considering 69% of LinkedIn US users earn $50,000 or more per year, this platform tends to hold the highest average disposable income and high-quality leads in certain industries.
However, unlike most other platforms, which focus on B2C advertising, the nature of LinkedIn makes it better suited to B2B advertising campaigns. So, service businesses and B2B product businesses tend to get better results on LinkedIn than other platforms.
There are four types of LinkedIn ads:
- Sponsored content: These ads — often through photos, videos or carousels — are displayed in LinkedIn’s newsfeed in order to reach a larger audience.
- Sponsored Messaging: This is LinkedIn’s version of email marketing, but rather than sending a message to the user’s inbox, it goes to their LinkedIn inbox, where the user can then interact either with a chatbot or a human customer representative.
- Text and Dynamic ads: Only visible to desktop users, text ads are small advertisements displayed at the top of the screen above the user’s newsfeed.
- Lead Gen forms: Using pre-filled forms in your LinkedIn ads, you can collect quality leads at scale.
Conclusion
As 2022 approaches, many small business owners are wondering what social networks they should be investing in and what platforms are going to be the best in the next years ahead. There are a lot of different opinions on this, with some claiming that Facebook will become less popular over time and Twitter will be overtaken by Instagram, while others say that Snapchat and Pinterest will become much more popular. In our view, all of these social networks are very important for businesses everywhere to invest their energy in.