Using Social Media as a Marketing Platform

Most of us have one or more social media accounts. If you have ever scrolled through Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, you came across advertisements or how they like to call it “sponsored updates” at some point.

Social media allows you to reach many people relatively easily, and what’s even better, you can usually be quite specific about who you want to target precisely, helping you get more out of your marketing dollar.

If you are unfamiliar with or own an SME and feel that social media marketing is useless, you are falling behind the curve. No matter what size of the company, everyone should be investing in social media marketing.

Below are some of the largest platforms that businesses are advertising on, as well as some related statistics.

It is worth investigating all of them and picking one or two aligned with and used by your target market.

We’ve also included some handy tips for maximising your marketing on each of these platforms.

Facebook

Facebook remains one of the largest social media platforms today. There are close to 2.6 billion users on the platform. That is a massive audience you might want to tap into. Furthermore, 98% of Facebook users report using it from their smartphone. Essentially, people’s smartphones become your microphone to advertise your business directly to them. Why miss out on such an opportunity? There are already 8 million SMEs advertising on Facebook, isn't it time you joined?

Facebook’s interface makes marketing for non-technical people easy. You can set monthly budgets, upload your artwork, and set easy targeting metrics based on age, geographic location, and profile preferences. Best of all, all advertising on Facebook utilises built-in tracking and analytics so you can easily measure the success of your campaigns.

Pro Tip: Facebook Advertising is fantastic for E-Commerce if done correctly.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not only for professionals looking for jobs. However, what you may not have known, is the platform is second to Facebook when it comes to B2B advertising. The platform reached a whooping 160 million people in 2020. It is a great B2B marketing tool because it is a platform where you can reach people based on their professions, jobs and industries. This means if you build a profile for your SME and regular post or run advertisements, you are highly likely to hit your target audience. Marketing on LinkedIn helps you engage with a specified community of professionals that are relevant to your business.

LinkedIn advertising works best when you create a page for your business. You can regularly post content like articles, customer testimonials, and much more. This steady content can be free advertising. If you want to take it a step further, you can promote your posted content through target advertisements.

Pro Tip: LinkedIn articles are a way to showcase your business’s expertise in a particular area. Better yet, you can boost or promote your articles through LinkedIn ads to generate more views and reach beyond your existing audience.

Instagram

Instagram does not have quite the number of users compared to LinkedIn and Facebook. However, what it lacks in user numbers it makes up for in ROI. Among marketers, Instagram produces the best ROI when it comes to advertising. Instagram spawned a new form of social media marketing called influencer marekting. These are users who have a high following and recognition from others on the platform. Businesses will pay these people to advertise their products on their accounts. If you would like to see a company that utilises influencer Instagram advertising brilliantly, have a look at Gym Shark’s profile.

If you want to start influencer marketing but are not sure how to get started, check out Tribe. Instagram remains one of the best social media platforms to target anyone under the age of 35. There are several ways to advertise on Instagram. You can go through an influencer, run a targeted ad, or IGTV. IGTV are short vertical videos run on the platform. 28% of businesses plan to integrate IGTV into their marketing within the next year. Instagram remains the best place to advertise fashion, home goods, food, and lifestyle products.

Pro Tip: Instagram is the best place to advertise your clothing product. You should set up an Instagram account for your business and find influencers in your local community that you can pay to advertise your account and products, or simply use Tribe.

Pinterest

Pinterest boasts a significant number of followers. As of January 2021, the platform has roughly 460 million global users, and 90 million of those users were in the U.S. Interestingly, Pinterest is used almost equally by B2B and B2C companies for marketing. The platform is primarily used as an image-sharing forum. Many artists, photographers, and chefs will share their creations on the site. Businesses can benefit from creating a profile and sharing content as well. It’s the perfect advertising platform for a catering company, wedding planners, interior designers, and clothing or fashion brands.

Similarly to LinkedIn, much of the advertising your SME can do on Pinterest is related to the content you post. It acts as free marketing for all the people who see your image on the platform. You can run targeted ads on Pinterest for all your products. Like Facebook Ads, you can set metrics to make sure you are reaching the right audiences.

Pro Tip: Pinterest remains a community of artists. You should make your ads and posts look creative and trendy. Advertising fashion, lifestyle, food, or cosmetic products on this platform is best.

Snapchat

Snapchat is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms among people ages 15-25. It has an average of 229 million daily users globally. The users also frequent the platform almost regularly. For example, 48% of Snapchat users report sharing content through the platform weekly. If 15-25 is your target audience, your advertisements are likely to hit them if you build a campaign on this platform. The platform offers several different forms of advertising. They offer advanced targeting capabilities such as location, demographics, interests, and devices. It is incredibly easy to build custom audiences in Snapchat advertising.

As a bonus, Snapchat does a great job at tracking the metrics of your ads. Reporting includes much of the information you would need to measure the success of your campaigns. All the reporting data and metrics are free when you create an advertisement on the platform.

Pro Tip: Snapchat is the best platform to connect your product or business with millennials and Gen z. Snapchat reaches 75 of millennials and Gen Z. Plus, on average, they spend 30 minutes every day on the platform.

Twitter

Twitter is in the top three of all social media platforms with the highest ROI for marketers. One reason for the high ROI could be the high number of daily global users, which reaches on average 166 million. The two age groups that are the most active are 25-34 and 55-64. Promoted advertisements appear in the newsfeed of the users you are trying to target. The platform, like most, lets you build targeted audiences based on several demographics. It also includes tracking and metric reporting for all your advertising campaigns on the site.

Twitter offers over 20 ad options so you can showcase your content and media in the best possible format. These formats are all developed to maximise your ROI and consistently produce conversions. These include image ads, video ads, carousel ads, moments ads, and text ads.

Pro Tip: Video and image ads have most impact on Twitter. However, this platform is not one where users want long content. It is best to keep your ads short, sweet, and trendy.

As you can see, each of these social media platforms has a massive audience you are not utilising for your business should you ignore advertising on them. You may have previously thought that social media advertising was reserved for large corporations. However, even with a small budget, if done right, you can have an immense impact.

The catch? You got to choose the right platform and content for your audience; otherwise, you won’t see a return on your marketing investment. So, it's key to know your audience, i.e. your target market - find more information about getting to know the people you are selling to here.

If you are interested in more marketing statistics, have a look at this article.