Today with the fact of the digitization of the world, there are so many social media platforms from where businesses can connect with their target audience and advertise their services or products. However, that doesn’t mean that each platform is the same, and so businesses should take into account which platforms work best for them with respect to goals and intended audience. In this blog post, we will go over the things to compare LinkedIn to other social media platforms and the things you need to consider in order to determine which platform is best for business.
1. LinkedIn: These are from the Professional Networking Platform:
LinkedIn has long been the best platform for professional networking and B2B peer contacts. It is a business focused on professionals from different industries making it a good place to get that business to target a professional audience. However LinkedIn has its features like the company pages and industry groups etc. This is an extremely powerful tool for dispensing thought leadership and sharing industry insights, recruiting top talent, creating business partnerships, and more.
2. Facebook: The All in One Social Platform
With billions of users throughout the world, Facebook is the biggest social media platform. It caters to a wide range of audiences, so is typically suited to business that desire to reach a wide consumer market. But Facebook’s features are an obvious company page, a group, targeted advertising, and e-commerce. Apart from that, it’s an ideal stage to fabricate brand cognizance, interface with the clients and to advance your site traffic. Organic reach on Facebook has also decreased over the years therefore, paid advertising is needed to reach your targeted audience.
3. Instagram: Visual Storytelling for Visual Brands:
Being visual, Instagram is a huge platform for the younger demographics or businesses who have visually appealing products or services to offer. This has features like photo and video upload, Stories, IGTV and shoppable posts. It’s easy to use Instagram to show off products, craft brand stories with visual content, or engage with a highly engaged user base.
4. Twitter: Real Time Updates and Individual Conversations.
Real time updates and chatting is what Twitter is about as a microblogging platform. There are millions of users, hence there is an individual, business, and influencers user bases there. With such a fast paced nature on Twitter, timely announcements, news updates and engaging conversation with industry is the perfect fit. Features include posts with hashtags, retweet and DM. But with so many tweets, it's a short life cycle for individual posts so you have a lot to keep up with with posting and active community engagement.
5. YouTube: Video Content and Engagement:
You can tell from YouTube’s two billion monthly active users that it’s the biggest player in the video content sphere. If you can use video (tutorials, product demos, vlogs), this is one of the most effective tools for businesses. Although brands can take advantage of YouTube opportunities for exposure, engagement and monetization through ads revenue and partnerships. If your company can create and promote high quality video content on a repeatable basis, it is an ideal fit.
6. TikTok: Short-Form, Viral Content:
The short form, creative videos that have made TikTok extremely popular, especially with those younger audiences. Designed for businesses to feature in their creativity, joining trending challenges, and enjoying the growing user base. For businesses with visually interesting products or services, and a demographic user base that fits with TikTok’s user base, TikTok is the perfect social media platform.
Considerations for Choosing the Right Platform:
1. Target Audience: Think about the demographics and professions of the people that you wish to purchase from. Are they mostly professionals, consumers and or a particular age group?
2. Business Goals: Match the features and capabilities of each platform to your company goals. Do you need to connect with customers, drive sales, make your brand known, or create professional networks?
3. Content Strategy: Examine what type of content you can create, and what platforms that can support. Do you have products with beautiful pictures, videos that educate, or content that holds everyone’s attention?
4. Budget and Resources: Think about what budget and resources you have for social media marketing. Some platforms just require more investment in advertising, or in content creation.
5. Competitor Analysis: Figure out where your competitors are strong and what advantages there might be, and what is off limits to you, in joining or differentiating based on those platforms.
Your business will have a hard time marketing on any social media platform if you don’t know your audience, your goals, your content strategy, and especially if you don’t have money and resources to invest in it. Even though LinkedIn is the best platform for professional networking and B2B interactions, others like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Tiktok are unique in their specs and users that focus more or less on a specific set of demographics and content types. A good social media strategy is based on using several platforms to get to your target audience in the best possible way. Understand what works well on different platforms, and based on that you will be able to choose wisely making use of your efforts and bringing the best out of all social media platforms.