Most Popular Social Media Platforms to Grow your Small Business

Starting an entrepreneurial journey requires tedious efforts, but social media marketing isn’t one of them. Nowadays, the ease of signing up on any online social platform and running an account has made it possible for businesses to effectively mark their presence on the web. If used smartly, a business can maximise its reach with these social media platforms.

Before delving into the matter, one needs to remember that a marketer’s job is to socialise his business amongst people while selling the solution to their problems and not just a product. Follow this mantra and you will have relevant followers and subscribers for your company.

Not sure which social media site is right for your small business? Fret not! This blog post will explore the most popular social media platforms and how your small business can prosper with their usage.

Here are the best social media platforms to grow your small business:

1. Facebook

Recently, Facebook has become a social networking website with 2 billion monthly active users. Its largest user base makes it the best place to grasp people’s attention for your business offerings.

Facebook can help your business gain valuable customers as it allows you to spread in-depth information about your offerings. With no limits to characters in a post, your content can be as descriptive as you want. Though, try to avoid irrelevant information, as it may risk losing people’s attention.

Besides, Facebook is a multimedia social platform, so you can use various forms of media in advertising your products and services.

You can use Facebook’s advertiser tools to target your prospective audience and adjust your marketing campaigns for the optimum response within affordable prices.

Facebook is known for its user-friendliness, so all you need to know is the basics of it.

2. Twitter

If you want to keep your online presence intact on the web, Twitter shouldn’t be left out in your social media marketing campaigns. Its monthly active user base is 328 million, making it a large platform to get your word out in the world.

Unlike many leading social sites, Twitter limits a post’s character length to just 140. So you have to be precise with the information given through this portal. If your tweet isn’t captivating enough to be liked, commented or retweeted, it will not make it to the trending list. However, its 140 character limit has its own advantage! You don’t have to spend hours constructing and writing a post for a tweet. Rather, you can play with words in accordance to your business by including relevant keywords and phrases in different ways.

For small businesses, Twitter can be a great place to interact with customers on an instant basis. It can be highly useful to actively respond to customer’s feedback, queries and to be informed about latest industry trends, customers’ preferences, and existing competition.

3. Instagram

Not all like to read what you have to say. And with visual media becoming more and more popular in content consumption, images and videos are now must-haves for a successful social media marketing plan. So don’t just tell, but show your customers what you are up to!

Instagram’s newly launched business profiles give access to statistics on your posts and seamless integration with Facebook’s ad platform.

Use hashtags that are relevant to your business as well as its products and services. Marketers and social media influencers are daily coming up with new hashtags to make their posts go viral and have maximum interaction with users.

Just like Facebook, Instagram also doesn’t have any character limit for posts. This means you can tweak your captions and content without worrying about the limit to a number of characters you can use.

Originally published at www.digitaloitte.com on August 4, 2017.