The past decade’s explosion in social media marketing has made it more important than ever to know how to effectively deploy a limited paid social budget. With so many social media platforms around, many small- and medium-sized businesses are focusing on cultivating a strong presence on one platform. It’s a good way for a business to avoid spreading its social budget too thin - but it does require choosing the right platform.
The truth is that it’s not always easy to tell at a glance which social media platform will offer the most opportunities for your brand. It takes some research, vision, data-crunching and possibly a little soul searching about what your business is here to accomplish. If that sounds like a tall order, don’t worry. We’ll help you break it down.
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To get started in your search for the right social media platform, take some time to answer these questions about any platform you’re considering.
Look at how the answers to these questions line up with your goals and strategies for your brand. For example, if you’re pitching your product to a demographically diverse audience of consumers, Facebook’s ubiquity and reach might be what you need. Meanwhile, a highly specialized brand with mostly B2B customers might be better off choosing LinkedIn.
To jump-start your research, here are some fast facts about the three most popular social media ad platforms: Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Each offers a unique set of tools for reaching your audience and it’s up to you to figure out which will reach your's best.
Facebook is so closely associated with the concept of social media that the movie about its founding was called 'The Social Network'. It has 218 million monthly active users in the United States and well over a billion globally - by far the most of any social platform.
However, some recent studies show that Facebook’s hold on younger users is slipping, and it recently changed its algorithm to reduce the visibility of ads and other public posts. It’s estimated that organic Facebook reach is down to around 6%. Nonetheless, it remains the biggest power player in social media advertising.
While it’s a little bit shy of Facebook’s sheer numbers with close to one billion total users, Instagram has massive cultural relevance on its side. It’s the social media playground of models, musicians, reality stars and other celebrities, and many advertisers ride that wave to success. Instagram is also known for influencers, social media stars (or stars-to-be) who are paid by advertisers to endorse their products and influence their followers to buy them.
Instagram ads have the highest engagement rate of any major social platform, although they also typically cost more. Their visually-oriented nature demands a well-developed visual brand, as the ROI on text-heavy ads is typically poor. Like Facebook (which owns Instagram), its algorithm is constantly changing to prioritize the content that its users interact with the most.
With over 100 hours of content uploaded every minute, YouTube is big, loud, somewhat unruly and massively influential. If you can cut through the noise, there are big rewards to be found. Many marketers consider YouTube ads to be the successor to television ads.
YouTube is a key platform for industries that benefit from product demonstrations such as cosmetics, food, tools and more. The Google-owned platform has also been busy expanding its offerings to advertisers. One of the best new tools for YouTube advertisers is TrueView, a type of ad that lets viewers choose ads that interest them more. With these ads, advertisers only pay for ads that viewers watch to the end or click on.
The options, of course, don’t end there. LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and numerous other specialty platforms offer unique tools for branding and customer engagement. We mentioned Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube because they tend to provide the most visual impact for end users. But if your strategy does not necessarily require such eye-catching marketing or your audience is less present on these platforms, we highly encourage you to explore alternatives to figure out what is best for your business.
No matter what platform you’re using, though, there are a few basics that remain the same: Do your research, test and retest, start small and, as always, know your customer and what they want.
By Expert commentator
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