I know you probably want a straight answer, but I’m afraid there isn’t one.
The best platform for your business growth is any platform that best fits your business type.
Take a look at some of the success stories below to understand what we mean by that.
How various brands used different social channels for their business growth
Starbucks: In 2017, Starbucks launched an Instagram campaignto promote their Unicorn Frappuccino. This campaign raised their sales by up to 3%.
What’s the correlation? The biggest consumers of this are kids, Gen Z, and a fraction of the millennial generation. Where can you find a good aggregation of these people? Facebook and Instagram. Since the Unicorn Frappuccino is a product that thrives off good marketing aesthetics, Instagram became the default place to promote it.
Does your business or product depend on good quality pictures, too? Is a good fraction of your audience kids, Gen Z, or millennial groups? If so, Instagram is definitely the best place for you. Check out these recent Instagram stats to find supporting facts.
IHOP: In 2018, IHOP (International House of Pancake) used Twitter to announce that it was changing its name temporarily to IHOB (International House of Burger). Their tweet generated almost 15k retweets, and their burger sales quadrupled in only a few months later.
What’s the correlation: Study suggests a good number of Twitter users are intellectuals – people who spend good time in offices and remote environments. What food do these people eat the most? Yes, you guessed right – snacks like burgers, pancakes, omelets.
Social media for business growth: What the numbers say
Provided a business is a match for a platform, it will surely grow.
For perspective: A recruitment agency business is best-suited to LinkedIn than a restaurant business. Does that mean a recruitment agency cannot grow/promote its business on Facebook or YouTube? Of course, it can. However, their best bet to quickly finding prospects is LinkedIn. Why? Because LinkedIn’s content strategy is best suited to professionals and career people.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the strength of various social channels and their potential to help businesses grow.
- Facebookhas a whopping 1.930 billion daily users
That number makes Facebook the most used social media network on the planet. From a business perspective, it also means there’s a potential to find many prospects here.
According to Statista:
- YouTube has 2.291 billion users
- Instagram has 1.393 billion users
- LinkedIn has 610 million users
- Snapchat has 538 million users
- Twitter has 436 million users
That’s an awful lot of social media users.
Choosing a social media channel to grow your business
In this section, we want to examine a couple of popular social media networks. We believe this will help you see what each platform is good for. And hopefully, with that, you can choose the best platform for your business growth.
Facebook.com
From the outside looking in, Facebook looks like the one-size-fits-all social media website. And quite frankly, it is.
With more than 2 billion active users, the number of Facebook users is equivalent to more than 25% of the world’s population. Promoting a business on Facebook is like exposing your brand to the whole world.
What kind of business is Facebook best for?
Virtually every business can use Facebook. Whether you’re a realtor, hotelier, restaurant business owner, SaaS business owner, marketer, freelancer, teacher, etc., there’s something for everyone on Facebook.
This is thanks to the diversity of the audiences on the platform. Here, you have as many kids as elderly ones, as many guys as girls, and so on.
Factors that make Facebook a good place for business growth
- Massive audience reach: with over 2 billion users, there are so many people to target.Facebook has the capacity to help you find new customers.
- Powerful ad reach: Posting an ad on Facebook is like placing a banner on the surface of the moon for everyone to see. Facebook’s reach is so huge that a simple ad can bring millions of customers to your business.
- Powerful analytics: Knowledge is power. Facebook equips you with powerful analytics of how your business is faring on its platform. This helps you make better-informed decisions.
- SEO results: Did you know it’s possible to rank a Facebook page on Google SERPs? Many Facebook pages show up on Google SERPs when you search for things. Having this sort of opportunity is a great way to attract organic buyers to your business. Of course, you’ll need a professional SEO services provider to help get your Facebook page on Google SERPs.
- Audience interaction: Facebook allows you to create groups for your customers where you can have personalized conversations with them. Talk about questions, inquiries, complaints, reviews, etc.
A hypothetical case of using Facebook to grow a business
You add a Facebook tracking pixel to your business website to pick up site visitors’ behavior. Now, say a visitor comes to your site to skim through your pages. The Facebook pixel will store their data. Now, when this visitor visits Facebook anytime in the future, Facebook will ensure they see your ad and brand massages no matter how short their stay is. Imagine if you have a new discount offer around the time of their visit. This is a guarantee that they’ll see it and probably check it out.
Instagram.com
Owned by Facebook.com (sorry, Meta.com), Instagram is another hotbed for business growth.
From a business growth perspective, Instagram represents a great place to generate social proof for your business. That is, a form of validation that shows people that your business is loved, popular, and accepted. With this validation comes organic lead, word-of-mouth referrals, and ultimately, sales.
What kind of business is Instagram best for?
Although any business can thrive on this platform, Instagram is best suited to those businesses that rely more on picture and video content. If your business can generate plenty of visual content, Instagram might work for you.
Mind you, Instagram is currently becoming oversaturated with content. To stand out of the crowd, you might need to rely on unorthodox strategies like animation content creation, celebrity influencers, cross-promotion, collaborative promotion, etc.
Factors that make Instagram a good place for business growth
- Large audience base: Over 1 billion users means you have a lot of prospective customers to target.
- The stories feature: with the 24-hour disappearing Stories feature, it’s easier to constantly stay in the eyes of your target audience, thus encouraging more ‘impulse buys.’
- Straight eCommerce integration: A checkout feature that allows users to see and buy products directly from the app.
- Hashtagging: Ensures your business is organically exposed to people that don’t even know you.
A hypothetical case of using Instagram to grow a business
You create an Instagram profile for your business, and then you load it with visual content. Thanks to your consistency with hashtagging, posting testimonials, and other strategies, this page starts to attract followers. After a while, you decide to run an Instagram promo ad for the page. The new traffic came, and they fell in love with the content (especially the testimonials). As you can expect, a bunch of them will definitely want to give your brand a try after that.
YouTube.com
Traditionally a video-sharing platform, YouTube is now officially a search engine and a social networking site.
Like the first two discussed, YouTube’s biggest selling point (from a business perspective) is its huge user base. Currently, there are over 2 billion active monthly users on YouTube.
What kind of business is YouTube best for?
Virtually every business. Even businesses that don’t do anything video-related can still find a way to use YouTube. If not via video creations outright, it would be through ads.
Factors that make YouTube a good place for business growth
- The YouTube ad feature: Try as they might, YouTubers are stuck with YouTube’s 5-second ad running. They just have to watch it. If you’re able to create something attention-grabbing, your business could land new prospects just by leveraging these short YouTube ads. According to Google itself, “Paid YouTubemobile advertising is 84% more likely to receive viewers’ attention than TV ” You can visit this page for more fascinating YouTube stats of the past year.
- Free SEO: YouTube is currently the video platform with the strongest presence on Google SERPs. If you’re present on YouTube and you play your cards right, you have a shot at a spot on Google’s highly-coveted pages. We recommend hiring this SEO Services Canada Company to help with your YouTubeSEO
- Informative content: Anytime people want to learn something (in video format), YouTube is where they go. Having a presence on YouTube means you stand a chance to woo new users to your brand.
- YouTubeSEO: With over 2 billion users, appearing on YouTube’s homepage is like listing your house on the front page of Forbes
Twitter.com
Traditionally, people used Twitter to follow and argue about trends, news, politics, etc.
Nowadays, it’s a hub for business promotions. From influencer marketing approaches to regular Twitter ads, businesses now use this platform to reach their audiences in any way they can.
If you know how to leverage the Twitter space, it can work in your favor, too.
What kind of business is Twitter best for?
Virtually every business. The key is engagement. If you know how to engage people (your audience), you can surely grow your business on Twitter.
Factors that make Twitter a good place for business growth
- Twitter custom ads for greater reach and higher audience engagement
- Twitter cards: make it easy to generate traffic from Twitter to your site
- Twitter influencers: gives your brand the social proof it needs to appear loved and relevant
- Twitter verification: Having a verification badge on Twitter will fetch you followers/fans/customers by default
- Organic audience interaction: With the Twitter search bar, you can search for keywords relevant to your business. From the resulting tweets, you can find opportunities for conversations to leverage. For example, you could find a tweet about a niche-relevant question to answer. By answering this question, you would get people to notice you.
- Twitter space: You could bring your audience into one room to educate them. This is a great way to build your customer loyalty.
If you’re looking to grow your business on the partnership front or in terms of workforce quality, LinkedIn is a good tool to have.
You won’t really find customers here. But you’ll find willing and ready-to partner B2B opportunities, as well as employees that will take your business to the next level.
Factors that make LinkedIn a good place for business growth
- Millions of ready-to-interact audience groups: People don’t come to LinkedIn to scamper around. If someone stumbles on your profile, chances are they will want to do business with you or work for you.
- Networking tools: LinkedIn makes it easy to find like-minded business minds to learn from or partner with.
- Talent recruit: A company is only as good as the employees at its disposal. If you’re looking to grow in terms of employee quality, LinkedIn represents a good place to identify talents.
- Sales opportunities: If you’re a B2B business, there’s an endless sales opportunity on LinkedIn you can leverage.
