The days of every business being on every social media platform are long behind us. In place of the urge to show a stack of social media icons at the bottom of your website, consider taking a more strategic approach and investing in only those social platforms that make the most sense for your marketing.
Eliminating extraneous social media work on platforms that aren’t the best fits will save money for your business and time for your team. You can then reallocate the freed-up resources toward making a bigger impact on your channels of choice. So, which channels should those be? Here’s a quick guide:
Facebook has become the go-to channel primarily for local shops and consumer businesses, thanks to its scalable and targeted advertising opportunities. There are many different ad formats and options available, along with advanced pixel capabilities to track conversions and segment audiences. Businesses can even catalog products directly on Facebook and link them to dynamic advertising that makes it easy to see the return on ad spend (ROAS). Meanwhile, Facebook’s Messenger app is a powerful customer service tool to quickly respond to inquiries.
Most business-to-business (B2B) companies will also want to create and at least lightly maintain a Facebook page, if for no other reason than the platform’s sheer scale at nearly 3 billion monthly active users and/or to potentially use the robust Business Suite for advertising down the road.
TikTok
Like many social media platforms before it, TikTok grew from a school fad into a serious marketing and advertising engine. It’s an ideal outlet for any consumer brand selling to a younger demographic. If you’re in apparel, beauty, travel, food, or any industry driven by influencer marketing, TikTok is the place to be. Here, your content will be less polished and more fun. It’s all about authenticity. The challenge is that TikTok moves fast and needs to be managed virtually by the minute to keep up with trends.
Outside of exceptionally creative and strategic use cases, most B2B companies don’t need to be on TikTok. We’re not trying to scare you away from it, but it’s difficult for, say, a manufacturer, to stand out and drive ROI on TikTok.
While Twitter has been mostly overtaken by news outlets and celebrities, it still serves a functional purpose for larger companies and name brands to engage with users, build a community of followers, and spin off witty content from what’s trending. That said, smaller businesses tend to struggle on Twitter because it’s more of a global conversation, whereas Facebook has locality among groups of friends. Twitter is also in quite a bit of flux since Elon Musk took over, so we generally recommend treading lightly or pausing altogether, at least until the platform’s policies, features—and, quite frankly, its place in the social sphere—stabilize.
If your brand has visual appeal (again, think apparel, beauty, travel, food, etc.), Instagram is a must-have in your social media marketing strategy. It’s the ultimate visual social platform and is evolving to include a much larger emphasis on short-form video alongside photography. The audience on Instagram tends to be younger than on Facebook but older than on TikTok. There’s a healthy balance of influencer marketing, infographics, brand photography, and storytelling, giving you plenty of space to develop a unique strategy. Instagram Shopping is built in for retail sales, so you can eliminate the steps of getting people from social media to your website and then to checkout.
B2B owners, if you’re reading this, here’s the one you’ve been waiting for. LinkedIn is the platform for you. Your business should be on LinkedIn. You should be on LinkedIn. Your employees should be on LinkedIn. Why? Because your current and future customers are all on LinkedIn. It’s the largest network of professionals on the internet, with highly targeted advertising (albeit at a higher price tag than on Facebook, but for qualified leads in return). A LinkedIn presence is also useful for employer branding and hiring efforts. Tech, finance, hospitality, and marketing visibly thrive on LinkedIn, but any and every B2B company can put LinkedIn to good use both for lead generation and recruiting.
With any of the platforms above, consistency and content quality are key. That’s why it’s important to know where your business belongs on social, focus on the platforms that work best, and feel free to ignore the rest. See how Netwave can help with your social media management.
