Social Media Marketing for Business: Social media platforms for businesses

Social media has become the go-to meeting place for billions of people every day. If your business isn’t active on social media, you miss valuable opportunities to connect with potential customers. With its ability to bring people together digitally, social media offers a highly cost-effective and personalized way to engage your audience and generate new business.

This guide will walk you through the most effective ways to use social media for your business. We’ll cover best practices for building a successful social media marketing strategy, how to measure your return on investment (ROI), and tips for choosing the right platforms to elevate your brand.

1. How to use social media for business

Social media is a powerful tool for growing your business. Use it to build brand awareness, connect with your audience, and promote your products or services. Share engaging content, interact with followers, and run targeted ad campaigns. With the right strategy, social media can drive traffic, generate leads, and boost sales.

Social media marketing strategy :
The best way to ensure success on social media is to go in with a plan. This means devising a social media marketing strategy that includes each platform you plan to use. Be sure to understand your customers and where they spend their time online—advised Robert Catalano, a Toshiba America Business Solutions digital marketing specialist.
Create a content calendar:
Your followers value a steady presence, so adhere to a consistent posting schedule. While being consistent, avoid posting too much, which can be off-putting for your followers. Veronica Clerkin, managing partner and founder of AMZG Agency, recommended using insights from social media platforms to inform your timing. “Consider where your followers live, age, gender, job title, etc.
Have fun with social media:
Use social media to increase customer engagement in a fun way. This can include running social media contests, hosting live videos with exciting updates or news, and linking to your website or special offers in your profile bio. Interactive, fun experiences on social media also help with lead generation.

2. Use social media for customer service.

Social media for customer service is a logical choice since many customers already use these platforms to communicate. By leveraging social media, you can resolve customer issues swiftly and effectively, fostering a loyal and satisfied customer base.

Respond to customer issues quickly:
Many businesses approach social media as another channel for self-promotion; they don’t always respond when customers comment on their posts or tweet at them. According to research from Convince & Convert, 42 per cent of consumers expect a response to a complaint on social media within 60 minutes, and nearly one-third expect a response within a half hour. Monitoring social media channels and responding to concerns promptly can help you build strong customer relationships.
Use hashtags strategically:
The way hashtags interact with social media algorithms can change frequently, so staying informed about the latest hashtag guidelines and best practices for each platform is essential. Hashtags are key in organizing content and making topics more straightforward to find, particularly on platforms like X (formerly Twitter). Additionally, you can enhance your hashtags by adding context or curating content to better engage your audience.

3. Use social media for sales.

One of the most direct and lucrative ways to experience the power of social media is through increased sales. You can boost sales on social media in various ways.

Advertise on social media:
The major social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and X, have advertising platforms that help you reach your target audience and monitor your ad campaigns.
Sell on social media:
Facebook and Instagram offer sales platforms and shoppable posts that make it easy for businesses to start selling online.
Work with brand ambassadors:
Finding social media influencers or enthusiastic customers to act as brand ambassadors effectively boosts word-of-mouth buzz about your business. This, in turn, can increase sales.
Improve your business with social listening:
Social listening is a process in which organizations take a macro view of what customers say online about the brand and use the information to improve the business. Social listening provides a broader view of industry trends and customer sentiment that may directly or indirectly impact a brand and its sales.
Respond quickly to inquiries:
Social media isn’t just about posting messages and ads. It’s also about communicating. “You can answer questions, provide tours or demo your products/services, or share behind-the-scenes looks of your company,” said Kamel Ben Yacoub, co-founder and CEO at Getuplead, a B2B social ads agency.
Build relationships with your followers:
When your followers feel they have a relationship with you, they’re more likely to engage with your content and follow through with a purchase or commitment to your business.

How Social Media Can Boost Your Business

Using social media for business has many advantages. Here are nine business benefits that social media provides.

• Boost brand awareness: Social media is an invaluable tool for building a brand and boosting brand awareness. “Social media provides targeting capability, as well as reach and scale, at a lower cost than almost all other marketing channels,” said Abdul Muhammad II, marketing and branding expert and chief growth officer at MDM Ventures. “People are on social media all day, every day. Brands must go where the people are.”
• Communicate your brand personality: It’s becoming more crucial than ever for businesses to have a distinct voice and engage with customers on a human level. Social media provides an easy avenue for creating a visual brand — allowing you to develop an identity and a voice to showcase your brand values and engage with followers.
• Position your brand as a leader: Social media will enable businesses to become thought leaders and stand out from their competitors — establishing themselves as industry leaders through engaging and relevant content. You can do this by sharing creative content on Instagram, writing thoughtful blog posts for LinkedIn or showing a fresh perspective in tweets. “Share your insights, and people will start to see you as the expert,” said Ben Yacoub.
• Increase website traffic: If your followers like your social media content, they become interested in you. Then, they’ll go to your business website to learn more about your company. This means higher website traffic and potentially more sales for you.
• Facilitate reputation management: Reputation is everything — social media gives you the perfect opportunity to communicate with customers and solve issues quickly. You can even create a unique hashtag your followers can use if they have a question or complaint to ensure the right people see it. You can also use social media to highlight positive reviews or comments.
• Provide analytics and insights: Most social media platforms have analytics tools; these allow you to monitor follower counts, engagement rates and CTRs. These numbers can help you determine the kinds of content your followers respond to best and tweak your marketing strategy accordingly.
• Allow targeted advertisements: It’s easy to create ads on social platforms, and the benefit is that you can specifically target them to suit your audience. Research has shown that users respond better when ads are tailored to them, which often increases engagement.
• Help monitor the competition: Aside from engaging with customers, social media helps you monitor your competitors. Follow your competitors and note what works well for them and what doesn’t. Work those insights into your social media marketing strategy.
• Promote your customers’s voices: Studies show that word-of-mouth advertising is more effective, and social media lets you highlight your actual customers. You can promote customer testimonials and reviews and inspire them to create original content that will appear organically on a user’s feed.

Social media platforms for businesses

Here’s an overview of the most popular social media platforms and their business tools.

Facebook

• Facebook, a part of the social media umbrella company Meta, is an extremely popular social media network. It boasts a varied audience of over 3 billion active monthly users as of 2024, according to Statista. It’s worthwhile for any business of any size to use Facebook for business.
• Use Facebook to share everything from photos to essential company updates. You can access powerful advertising tools and in-depth analytics with a business account. Business pages also have many customization options, highlighting your contact information, hours of operation, the products and services you offer, and much more.

Instagram

• Also under the Meta umbrella, Instagram is another incredibly popular platform. It has more than 2 billion active monthly users in 2024, according to Statista. From Instagram Live to Instagram Stories, there are multiple ways to use Instagram for your business. Instagram is a visual platform focused on photo and video posts, so it’s an excellent tool for companies with strong visual content to share. It’s also almost entirely mobile, with tools and services optimized for mobile.
• More artistic niches tend to excel on Instagram, but most businesses can benefit from the platform and its broad user base if you target your audience. Your Instagram account manager should have a good eye for detail and some photography skills — ensuring the photos and videos posted to your account are high quality.

X (Formerly Twitter)

• X is great for short updates, engaging with followers and sharing links to your business blog. However, the platform isn’t ideal for all businesses.
• On X, you can share short tweets (240 characters or fewer), videos, images, links, polls and more. It’s also easy to interact with your audience on this platform by mentioning users in your posts and liking and retweeting tweets.
• You should skip this social media network if you’re a highly visual business with no strong brand voice. However, many companies excel on X because they use a unique, on-brand voice to their advantage.
• Other companies use X for business functions like handling customer service. Active, X-using customers will seek out companies to express concerns or share praise.

Snapchat

• Snapchat is a mobile-only, visual social media network known for its disappearing content.
• Users can send videos and photos to each other or post content to their public Stories, which disappear after 24 hours. The app has expanded to include chat, messaging, image storage, events and media content. Now, content posted on Snapchat can easily be saved and uploaded elsewhere.
• Because posts are temporary, there is less pressure to create super-polished content. You can also see how many and which specific users viewed your story. When it comes to Snapchat for business, a small business will most likely utilize the platform’s Stories feature. However, only users who have added you can view your Stories content. Once you have an audience, Stories allows you to easily create story-driven and interactive content.

YouTube

Google-owned YouTube is a video-sharing platform where people can view, upload, rate, share and comment on content. The site is a massive hub for news and entertainment.
Suppose your company has a creative, visual or educational component, and you should consider using YouTube for business. The platform is heavily creative, so it’s essential to have a dedicated video editor producing content. However, your company doesn’t need a channel to market on the platform; there’s a subculture of YouTube influencers who publish frequent videos and often maintain large audiences.

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn boasts over 1 billion users, making it the leading platform for professional networking. It offers an exceptional environment for discovering top talent, establishing yourself as an industry leader, and promoting your business.
• Designed with a professional focus, LinkedIn stands apart from other social media platforms by catering to businesses and professionals. Users craft profiles akin to resumes; companies can create pages highlighting their offerings. As a professional-centric platform, LinkedIn is ideal for posting job opportunities and sharing insights into company culture.
• You can also engage in industry-specific LinkedIn Groups to share knowledge and answer questions, helping to boost your brand’s visibility and drive traffic to your company page and website. Like on X, maintaining a balance of original and curated content is essential. Commit to producing high-quality, professional posts that align with your business objectives.

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