If you want to use social media for the promotion of your product/s, then it’s surely a wise decision. But, at the same time, it’s wiser to know what social networking sites will give the maximum return for your investment alone, in addition, you need to use them for business purposes effectively.
In a word, what are the best social media sites for business?
In fact, social media is one of the cheapest forms of marketing for businesses available. Not only is this cheap, but also effective because the Return on investment it provides to the business is growing day by day.
So, it’s high time you went to utilize the power of social media. However, it’s necessary to know which social media site you would choose to make the investment in as the ‘best social media sites for business.’
Why is Social Media Good For Business?
From research, it has been found that 81 percent of the US population has at least one social media profile. More than 50 percent of these users have two or more.
So, if you choose social media for marketing and business, you have more chances to connect and influence a massive pool of customers that are otherwise not possible.
Social media is not just a time-pass medium for people. They also use it to make their purchasing decisions.
For example, 70% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers have acquired customers through Facebook. 93 percent of Pinterest users use this site to plan and make purchases.
Customers spend 20-40 percent more money on companies that use social media.
Furthermore, the percentage of customers who have had a positive experience with a business on social media and recommend the companies to friends and family is more than 70 percent.
In this way, the possibility of using social media and the quantity of extracting output is unending. Hence, choosing the best social media sites for business promotion is very important.
How Social Media Facilitates Business?
Social media sites are very interactive tools that connect to bigger audiences in a shorter span of time. By using these platforms, you can:
- Increase the visibility of your business,
- Promote your products or services,
- Apply diversified ways to attract potential customers
- generate new leads, and
- Drive sales
- Get customers feedback
- Re-evaluate your plans and procedures.
What are The Best Social Media Sites For Business?
The percentage given above shows that you can make money with the use of social media.
But, which social media site would be best for your business will depend on some factors like your business type, the structure of the business, your budget, your targeted segment, and the type of your chosen social media.
Just as each business belongs to a separate class, each social media is specialized for separate functions, content, design, and user base.
Hence, here we’re trying to provide you with guidelines on choosing your desired social media sites from the list of 10.
10 Top Best Social Media Sites For Business
Here’s the list of social media sites list that is perfect for business. You can earn a good amount of money using these social media sites.
- Facebook Messenger
- Snapchat
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Yelp
1. Facebook
Size does matter and the size of the number of users of Facebook also matters, as with more than 2.6 billion users Facebook is the number one social media site in the world.
If your business aims at creating brand awareness, website traffic, lead generation, or online conversions, Facebook will make a difference in reaching your goals properly.
Facebook is the top social media site for its wide user base and demographic of users. Almost everyone can find their target customers using this site and get a return on their investment.
Now, you may be thinking, “How can I be sure the potential customers would see the content of my business?”
You can do it through ‘Facebook Advertising.’ Facebook’s advertising tools are by far the most advanced of all social media platforms. On Facebook, you can determine your customer base by age, gender, employment, interest, relationship status, purchasing behavior, and more.
This gives you the opportunity to target your exact audience and put your ads and content in their newsfeed while they’re scrolling on the homepage. Facebook serves your purpose of attracting customers for sure.
There are only 2 exceptions when you can go for other social media than Facebook. If you don’t have a social media budget and if your type of business is prohibited to advertise on it according to the ad policies of Facebook (For example, if you are a vaping or tobacco company).
On Facebook, you have to pay for extracting results. You’ll need an advertising budget to reach them. Don’t worry! Millions of people have seen significant returns on investment after investing in Facebook ads.
Integrating great content and A/B split testing, with Facebook’s extensive data, and user base can be a great powerful combination for your business.
2. Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger is part of Facebook, however, you’ve to download it separately on your mobile devices to use it. It has some additional features that work for boosting customers.
Facebook Messenger is an app that allows Facebook users to send messages directly to one another. This function is also extended to business pages.
As Facebook messenger is part of Facebook, it has access to Facebook’s large user base and advertising platform. You can surely use it for extracting benefits.
However, Facebook has an advertising campaign that’s specially tailored for Facebook messenger.
For example, when someone clicks on your ad, they will be prompted to start messaging with your business page. And if it’s done, your business page got the lead to follow up based on that messaging.
Outside of using Facebook Messenger advertising, you can also set up automated messages for the business page.
Hence, if someone messages your business page, Facebook Messenger will send an automated message to them.
3. Instagram
Instagram was taken over by Facebook some years ago and it’s a very interactive site with 500 million daily active users. Seeing the high potential of Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, bought it out just 18 months after it launched for $1 billion.
After the acquisition by Facebook, it is still growing and expanding its operation. As Instagram is part of Meta, the mother group of Facebook. It has access to the same extensive user base and helping platforms like Facebook and Facebook Messenger.
However, having the chance of using the Facebook user base, Instagram also has its own set of organic benefits. The term ‘organic’ means functions you can perform or results in you can achieve without paying dollars for advertising purposes.
Moreover, as Instagram is also a visual platform, its response is more than just a write-up, because people remember 80 percent of what they see.
This percentage is much more than the writing content. Surely, it’s one of the best social media sites for business, if the output of visuality is counted.
4. Pinterest
If your business is in the creative industry and customers are mainly females, then Pinterest is a social platform suitable for you. Among the 291 million monthly active users, 81 percent are female.
And, 93 % of Pinterest users said they use it to plan for their purchasing decisions, while 87 percent admit that they have purchased something because of Pinterest.
Hence, it can be said the best social media sites for business for girls and women. Food recipes, lifestyle articles, wedding topics, and outfit ideas are some of the notable content of Pinterest.
Hence, if your business matches any of these elements, you can utilize Pinterest as one of your social media sites for business purposes.
The advertising platform of Pinterest isn’t as advanced as that of Facebook, however, you can use paid tools to boost your business posts. You can also track online conversations through Pinterest ads.
In addition, Pinterest has some organic capacity that is absent on other social media platforms.
The number of keywords in a post determines the condition of organic reach on Pinterest if these are in alignment with user-searching elements.
This gives businesses a chance to strategically execute their plan by creating content containing keywords that are searched a lot on Pinterest. And that can be possible without spending extra dollars on advertising.
5. Snapchat
Snapchat allows users to send photos or videos either directly to another user or to their Snapchat story. However, a Snapchat (photo or video) sent directly to another user can be viewed only once.
But, a Snapchat story is visible up to 24 hours after it’s published. If your target group is young customers, then Snapchat would be one of the most effective and best social media sites for business promotion.
With more than 350 million monthly active users, and 203 million daily active users, Snapchat is a rising social media and communication site. 71 percent of their users are under 34, while more than half of them are aged between 18 to 24.
Snapchat shares the advantage of the visual content of Instagram as its posts have to include either a photo or a video. More than 10 million video views are on Snapchat. You can leverage your company’s content by being a part of these video collections.
Snapchat also has paid advertising options where you can have a linkable Snapchat in the discovery section of Snapchat.
6. YouTube
The video-watching platform YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly active users which are next to Facebook in terms of the number of users. So, here you’ve got the chance to interact with more than 30 million daily active users.
As part of Google, the tech giant, it can utilize the great features of Google. Hence, YouTube can play on Google’s advertising platform while running your YouTube ads.
You can also optimize the search of the YouTube video of your company with the exact keywords.
So, without spending extra money on advertising, you can raise the search ranking of your YouTube video. You just have to include the searched keywords in your title and video description and the actual list of keywords in the keywords tool.
If you can post relevant and exciting videos on YouTube, it can turn to you as one of the best social media sites for business.
7. Twitter
Twitter is one of the older social networking sites with more than 350 million monthly active users. With limited characters, you can post photos and videos here, but Twitter has the excellent feature of real-time updates.
In addition, the effective use of hashtags is another important feature you can count on. Through hashtags, potential customers can search and find you if their hashtag word is the same as yours.
And, you can also find potential customers by using the hashtag properly.
For instance, if you’re a car wash company, you can find your target audience by how they’ve used the same or similar hashtags in their tweet.
If you tweet the hashtags with a discount for your car wash, you’d most likely get new customers.
8. LinkedIn
If your business follows a Business-to-Business (B2B) model and targets customers based on job designation, then LinkedIn can be one of the best social media sites for business to you.
With more than 310 million monthly active users, LinkedIn is a great reservoir of professional people.
As LinkedIn is the social media site for businesses and professionals, people here provide more accurate information about their employment, employers, and job designations. Official contact details etc.
Though the advertising platform of LinkedIn is not as advanced as that of Facebook, it would give you a lot more professional information than Facebook does.
This can bring out crucial benefits for your business if it depends upon targeting specific businesses or professions.
9. TikTok
TikTok is a video-based social media platform that was launched in the last quarter of 2018. It’s an app by which the users can make video content of 15 seconds and can share it on the site.
Within a very short time, this Chinese app got overwhelming popularity as its total number of users is 1.2 billion and its active users are 500 million.
In fact, its user base surpassed strong social platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.
Though its users-base is really big, it has a long way to go when we talk about advertising. Marketers can only use this platform if they utilize the capacity of the influencer on TikTok.
However, TikTok is a site, especially for Generation Z, and it’s still hard to find the right ways of marketing this segment.
10. Yelp
Though Yelp is not a very familiar social media site, it can be your list of marketing and advertising purposes, as it plays an important role in maintaining your company’s brand and image.
Yelp has 178 million monthly users and these users include people who want worldly confirmation about the positive or negative experience of your business.
This exceptional site provides your business the chance with keeping up its reputation by encouraging strong reviews and responding to and handling negative reviews.
By doing this, you can create an organic sense of trust and accountability between your business and the customers. And this feature can pave the way for your growing and retaining customers to a new horizon.
Insights
So, here are the top 10 social networking sites that can facilitate your business according to your business type. No, you’ve to decide which are the best social media sites for business for you and how you use them for the best outcomes.
