Introduction
I’m sure everyone wonders what is the best Social Media platform to use to engage their followers and build their brand, right? We do too! We’re going to dissect some of the best Social Media platforms for you to make the best, informed decision for your team or brand. Follow along below to find out!
Year established: 2004
MAU: 2.80 Billion users
Audience: 25-34
Daily usage: 35 min/day
Location: India, 270 million users
Best feature: You can monitor your competition
Everyone’s heard of Facebook, right? Well, there’s a reason is seems “everyone” has heard of this well-known Social Media platform and that’s because there are over two billion active users per month to their site. That’s more than a quarter of the world’s population! With the ability to connect to your estranged Aunt Suzie living across the globe, it’s no wonder marketers continue to keep Facebook in their social media arsenal.
YouTube
Year established: 2005
MAU: 2.3 Billion users
Audience: 15-25
Daily usage: 40+ min/day
Location: US, 16.4% of users
Best feature: 2nd most popular search engine (after Google)
Here’s the first (but not the last) video-sharing social media platform on our list. Now, this may seem a bit more of a niche, but social media is now leaning into the more visual platform a-la stories, etc. People are used to the “instant gratification” of it all and YouTube delivers on this. In fact, there are more people who watch videos on YouTube than they do network or cable television, and that number continues to grow.
Now, you and your social media team may not be in a place to create and produce full-blown videos just yet and that’s ok! There are many ways to be “social” on this platform too. The most obvious one is to create your own channel and start posting video content. But even if this isn’t something you or your organization is able to invest in at the moment, YouTube can be used as a social platform with space to comment and “@” other commenters.
Year established: 2010
MAU: 1 Billion users
Audience: 25-34
Daily usage: 30m-1hr/day
Location: US & India, 140 mil users
Best feature: Professional Dashboard (analytics)
With one billion active users per month, Instagram is another photo and video sharing site to make it on our list. Instagram became popular due to the fact that you, the user, could post an image via your cell phone in an instant. It quickly gained users, 25,000, within weeks of launching!
I don’t know about you but when I think Instagram, I immediately think of influencers. This is the place to connect with those influencers. Almost 90% think that Instagram is the best place for influencer marketing and it’s an over $2 Billion market and growing!
There’s also the hashtag – the “#” symbol to be used to curate certain types of images. Hashtags are still one of the best ways to get found by new followers. According to a blog on later.com, “a post with at least one Instagram hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement than a post without a hashtag” https://later.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-using-instagram-hashtags/
TikTok
Year established: 2016
MAU: 1.29 Billion users
Audience: 16-24
Daily usage: 50-80 min/day
Location: China, 600 million users
Best feature: anyone can create content
TikTok is the newest social media platform on our list and it is exploding especially with the younger generation. At first glance, TikTok would seem a bit difficult to use since the content seems all over the place. This is actually one of the reasons why TikTok is a great option for marketers though. “Tiktok is a social media platform that allows the user to produce and share very short creative videos of 15 to 60 seconds” https://bettermarketing.pub/12-facts-you-should-know-about-tiktok-908f4b8495b. And the algorithm on TikTok is very generous so there’s a possibility to go viral without even having any followers!
Year established: 2006
MAU: 353.1 Million users
Audience: 25-34, 35-49
Daily usage: 6 min/day
Location: US, 68.7 Million users
Best feature: Great for networking and connecting
Twitter is a “microblogging” site. It started where the limit to sharing a post was 140 characters but now it’s double that at 280.
Twitter is great for a few things: 1) users can “blog” all day long and not bore your audience and 2) it’s good for sharing, or “re-tweeting” other users’ content. “The snappy nature of tweets means that Twitter is widely used by smartphone users who don’t want to read long content items on-screen” https://esrc.ukri.org/research/impact-toolkit/social-media/twitter/what-is-twitter/
Year established: 2003
MAU: 310 Million users
Audience: 25-34
Daily usage: 6 min/visit
Location: US, 174 Million user
Best feature: Great B2B marketing
If TikTok is the “baby” of our list, LinkedIn could be considered the big brother of the bunch. LinkedIn is targeted for the professional and it’s the social media site for job hunting, networking, and connections in the industry.
This would be the place to share industry news or more business-related content. LinkedIn has been established and even though it may not generate long visits from users, like YouTube, for example, the visits on LinkedIn are intentional.
Closing
Although we can’t really tell you which Social Media platform will be the best for you or your brand, we can give you some of the most popular sites people are using on the daily. It is not recommended to use all of these platforms for your social media needs, but which ones are BEST for you and the goals of your organization.
Make sure to not spread yourself, or your team, too thin by being on ALL the social media platforms all at once. It takes time to know which platform(s) are used most by your (soon-to-be) clients. Focus on your buyer personas and where they “live” on social media and start there. Go out there and find them!
Thank you for following along! If you would like more information on any of the above information, check us out at The Social Media Marketing University. We’ve got more great content for you and all your social media quandaries.