- September 11, 2019
- Posted by: persist
- Category: Social Media
The time businesses spend on social media marketing is consistently growing, but what social media channels should you invest in to generate the highest possible ROI for your business?
Finding the right social media channels to generate the most revenue for your business at the lowest cost will mostly depend on the nature of your business, your goals, and your audience’s preferences and demographics.
Don’t spend all your time focusing on Instagram if your target audience is not there. Also, you don’t need to promote your business on every single social media channel because not all of them will be equally effective. Choose those social media platforms that work for your target audience and your business, with the resources you have to invest.
Don’t forget that the right social media channel will help you connect with more customers, nurture relationships, build trust, cultivate authenticity, and convert your audience when the time comes. You should be in it for the long run, so make it profitable.
Make your online marketing investment worthwhile. Review different social media platforms, evaluate your social media strategy altogether and grow your revenue.
To help you achieve your goal and increase ROI, we are going to review top social media platforms and help you choose the most profitable social media channels for your business.
How to Choose the Best Social Media Channel for Your Business
Table of Contents
To decide what social media channels make the most sense for your business to generate the most ROI, you need to analyze your goals, audience (customers), and competition.
Answer these questions:
- Who is my target audience?
Answering this question will help you define your audience profile – their interests, gender, age, language, location, income, challenges, education, etc. - What social media networks do my customers use?
Answering this question will help you locate social media channels where your customers spend their time online. - Am I a B2C or a B2B brand?
Answering this question will help you choose social media channels that truly align with your industry, brand, or the type of product and content you offer. - What social media channels are my competitors using?
Answering this question and analyzing what your competitors do on social media will help you save time, skip on possible mistakes, and provide valuable insights on where and how to engage with your audience. - How many social media channels can I afford to take on?
Answering this question will help you analyze resources and budget you need to invest in order to achieve your goals on social media. Nurturing audience on more social media channels in a professional way will require more resources (time, budget, and expertise) than using only one social media channel. - What do I want to achieve?
Answering this question helps you define what results do you expect to achieve with your social media strategy. Is it customer service, brand awareness, traffic to your website, sales, community building, or everything?
After you analyze your audience, competition, goals, and resources, it is time to review various social media channels and pick the right one(s) for your business.
Top Social Media Platforms for Your Business
To achieve your goals, reach the target audience, and grow revenue, choose social media channels that fit your needs. Not all social media channels produce the same results, fit all industries, reach the same people, or involve the same strategy.
Continue reading to learn all about the most popular social media channels, what type of content they require, who uses them and what type of audience do they reach, and ultimately, make your selection and social media strategy as easy as possible.
Probably the most widely used social media platform, Facebook has about 2.41 billion daily active users and about 2 billion users in total. More than 175 million people daily share a ‘love’ reaction on Facebook, while over 800 million people ‘like’ something on Facebook every day.
Gender split between Facebook users is 56% male and 44% female. Although there are no definitive demographic statistics, the most active Facebook users are women and men between 18 and 34 years of age. With 307 million users in Europe and over 68% of U.S. adults using it, Facebook is a social media network with the largest audience.
This is one of the most complete social media channels that people are used to visiting and checking out.
Organic traffic on Facebook declined in recent years, so you need to be able to pay for promotion. You can create content that is specific to your audience. The network offers many options, like search, video and slide creation, creating groups, and detailed reporting options.
With over 1 billion users total, 600 million monthly active users, and 150 million people daily using Instagram Stories, Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms.
Overall, Instagram attracts more women than men. 68% of all Instagram users are female. 38% of female internet users use Instagram while only 26% of men who use the internet are on Instagram, too.
When it comes to age groups, 90% of Instagram users are under 35 years of age. The largest number of internet users who also use Instagram, 59%, are in the age group between 18 and 29, while 33% is between the ages of 30 and 49. Also, teenagers find Instagram the most relevant and most important social media channel, while 34% of young people who identify themselves as Millenials also use Instagram.
Instagram is ideal to include in your social media strategy if your content is highly visual, captivating, and engaging. There are many options for advertising, from stories and videos, direct messages, tagging, follower list, to hashtags.
However, similarly to Facebook that now owns Instagram, organic reach is in a steady decline so you need to pay to be able to seriously play on this platform.
This micro-blogging social media platform gathers about 317 to 328 million active users worldwide with 80% mobile users. 79% of all Twitter users are located out of the U.S. An interesting fact is that 12% of Americans use this platform as their main news source.
When it comes to age groups that use Twitter, 37% of all Twitter users are between the ages of 18 and 29. Only 25% of Twitter users are in the age group between 30 to 49. In terms of gender, Twitter gathers 21% of all female internet users and 24% of all male internet users.
Twitter is convenient for businesses that want to offer customer service via social, promote website content, and share short quotes or thoughts. Gifs are also an option, as well as paid adverts.
Don’t forget that character length on Twitter posts is limited, so your posts need to stay short and to the point.
With 250 million people using it monthly, Pinterest gained over 5 million users more than in 2018. Only in the U.S., the number of Pinterest users increased to 77.4 million people, according to eMarketer.
When it comes to gender, 41 % of American women use Pinterest while 50% of men started using Pinterest more than in 2018. Pinterest is growing in popularity among American dads who use this platform to browse and pin the outdoors, DIY projects, and more.
When it comes to age groups, 34% of Americans between the ages 18 to 49 use Pinterest. Educated and high-income households are more likely to use Pinterest than less educated and low-income U.S. households.
People mostly browse Pinterest from their mobile devices — 80% of users.
Pinterest offers higher conversion rates when compared to other social media platforms. It’s great for businesses that are niche-specific — home decor, interior design, DIY, etc. You can create boards and your followers can choose to follow all of them or just specific ones. It’s best to pin your own content, but if you pin copyrighted content, make sure to name the source. Driving traffic to your business website is easy because pins are hyperlinked to their source.
If you’re in the B2B industry, LinkedIn is the perfect social media network for professionals like you. With 500 million registered
users worldwide and 138 million in the U.S., LinkedIn is the most popular professional social media network.
Graduates and students are its fastest-growing demographic group. LinkedIn users who are in the age group 18 to 29 make a quarter of all of its users, while 61% make those who are between 30 and 64 years of age. When it comes to gender, women make 44% of LinkedIn users while 56% are male.
Use LinkedIn to reach decision-making people because this group makes 43% on this network. LinkedIn is convenient to create and engage in various groups, share job postings, share company news, website posts, etc.
This social media network is great for reaching out to professionals and communicating directly with them. Paid advertising is also an option.
YouTube
Have you heard of the fact that YouTube was a country, it would be one of the largest countries in the world?
With over 1 billion users and growing each day, YouTube has even local versions in 88 countries and is available in 76 languages. Over a billion hours each day are watched on YouTube. Users spend 8 minutes and 41 seconds daily on YouTube, on average. More than half of these views are happening on mobile devices.
This is one of the few social media platforms that is used even by those who are 75 years of age and older.
If you decide to advertise your business on YouTube, have in mind that YouTube mobile ads receive viewer attention 83 % of the time, according to Ipsos Reid.
Keep Experimenting, Analyzing and Measuring Your Results
When you figure out where your audience is, make sure to pick only those social media platforms that gather them and that you can do well. Rather be active on only two social media channels and do them properly, than trying to do five or more, failing to reach your audience on them. Always use high-quality images and videos, and check what are your competitors and peers doing.
Use analytics tools like Buffer to get weekly email performance reports where you can check out your analytics and see what are your most clicked posts. You can also log into your analytics and find out your most clicked posts.
Don’t wait to start planning, creating and sharing your content with your audience. If you have trouble deciding on what social media to use to generate the highest possible ROI, let us help you. Even if you have already chosen the platforms but you don’t have time, expertise or resources to manage them, we can help with that, too. Contact us today to discuss how can we help you with social media management and strategy.