There’s no denying the importance of social media in digital marketing.
Between the major networks, there are billions of engaged users.
The only problem is that every day, more and more options are appearing. It’s impossible to chase all of them without spreading yourself too thin which results in a poor showing.
With that understanding, it’s important to choose the best channels for your business and concentrate on them to produce the highest ROI.
We’ll explore three social platforms to drive traffic, revenue, and brand awareness for the rest of this year and well into the next.
Pinterest is a unique platform because it’s built to send referral traffic to other platforms. A large amount of the users are educated and have a household income of more than $100,000. That’s not the most interesting part.
93% of active pinners say they use Pinterest to plan for purchases. The majority of people who’re on Pinterest are there because they want to buy something. Can you say the same thing about Facebook?
These are all well and good but don’t people only post about food and their weddings on Pinterest? This was a common misconception for me as well until I dug a bit deeper. Pinterest has a rich variety of content across many topics.
While it may be true, there are a lot of women there so it’d only appeal to brands that target women, but that’s not the case. Though women still make up the majority of users, men are the faster-growing segment.
The icing on the cake is that Pinterest is designed to send people away from the application. In a world when all social media platforms what to increase their own engagement, it’s a rare thing to see one that is actively sending referral traffic to another website.
Think of Pinterest as a large visual search engine with engaged users, higher conversions, and higher average order values.
Instagram is the social media world and seems to be locked in a battle of dominance with Snapchat. We won’t get into that here.
As of this writing, Instagram has roughly 800 million monthly active users, and that number looks to be on the rise. It’s no wonder brands are taking their Instagram marketing strategies seriously.
It seems to be the easiest platform to develop and an endless supply of user-generated content (UGC) to build awareness and engagement. When Instagram started allowing users to create business accounts, the number of U.S. businesses skyrocketed.
It paid off because 30% of Instagram users have purchased a product they first saw on the platform.
Though Instagram engagement is some of the highest in the business beating out Facebook and Twitter by a large margin, a lot of posts don’t get seen. This is because of changes to their algorithm which tends to show you content from pages you’ve interacted with in the past.
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That means if you’re going to take Instagram seriously, you’ll need to create content that people love while interacting with them.
To top it off, Instagram is the easiest place to interact with influencers. According to a survey by Zine, 80% of influencers prefer Instagram for collaboration. Blogging comes in a second place but only carries 16% of the vote.
Instagram has its own challenges, but it still presents a great opportunity for brands now and in the future.
Last on our list of social media platforms you should be using is the premier professional network. Let’s get this out of the way; the 500 million LinkedIn users are there for professional connections, business opportunities, and reputation building.
Yes, it’s a social media platform.
No, you may not get away with certain kinds of content and memes.
A large portion of the users (forty million people) is in decision making the position at their organizations. If you’re on the hunt for people that can actually buy your business products and services, then LinkedIn is your first and last stop.
In addition to the large audience of potential buyers, it’s also a great place to recruit your next team member. There are forty million recent college graduates or soon to be graduates on the platform.
That’s a huge number to sift through, but LinkedIn has talent solutions that’ll help you find and recruit the best candidates and organizations for your organization.
Finally, LinkedIn is a great way to publish content that will appeal to your professional peers. The result will be an increase in authority in your field and achieving that ever elusive thought leadership.
LinkedIn may be the smaller than the other social platforms, but it makes up for it with the quality of its users.
Conclusion
There are dozens of social media platforms available right now. Some of them may be better suited to your business than the ones mentioned here.
That doesn’t take away from the fact that the social media platforms we’ve focused on have proven they’re able to generate revenue, connections, and opportunities for their users time and again.
Even if you don’t open a new account today and start posting content, these platforms will still be around when you’re ready. Just remember that there’s no time like the present to start building your audience on these social platforms.
Featured image courtesy of Raw Pixel
