While there’s little doubt that almost any business can benefit from social media, don’t make the mistake in assuming that every social media outlet is worth your time. With new platforms emerging regularly, trying to maintain a presence on each one is sheer madness. With social media, you need to pick and choose carefully. Let’s take a look at the most popular outlets filtered through two sample businesses, a retail outlet (B2C) and a small boutique accounting firm (B2B).
This behemoth has proven it has staying power. Over one billion people use this social media each month. This one should be thought of as the “social home” for your business. Creating a business page on Facebook is a must for both your retail outlet and accounting firm. But if you’re going to use Facebook, then really USE Facebook. Engage frequently or you’ll find it to be a waste of time.
Facebook has some powerful tools to serve your content to people you want it to be delivered to. But this is going to cost you some extra cash.
Additionally, Facebook started its own marketplace services, where people can look up locally sourced products, so it is yet another place where you shouldn't be missing. Facebook groups are then a great place to be to target your audience for free. And no, we don't mean your own group (which is just a nice bonus), but groups where your users normally hang out. Retail outlet won't benefit much from being in a group focused on auto-moto tunning and your accounting services will be harder to advertise in the group "We love deers". Choose your groups wisely unless you like to be overwhelmed by useless notifications and wasted resources.
Though substantially smaller than Facebook, Twitter still has 215 million active users. And like Facebook, Twitter would be a good option for either of our sample businesses. Known primarily as a news-breaking site, it would be a great way for a retail business to interact with customers one-on-one. For our accounting firm, be careful not to get involved in the often Wild West verbal shootouts that go on.
It would be an excellent way to educate people with quick-hit tax advice.
Traditionally, LinkedIn has been thought of as the domain of professionals, and it certainly is a great place for an accounting firm to stake out a niche of expertise and even network for new customers. When it comes to retail, LinkedIn is probably not the best place to try and directly sell products, but could be a goldmine for finding vendors and great employees.
LinkedIn is a platform for anyone who is looking to advance their career or business. This can include people from various professional backgrounds, such as small business owners, students, and job seekers. LinkedIn members can use LinkedIn to tap into a network of professionals, companies, and groups within and beyond their industry.
As a primarily visual social media, Instagram lends itself well to retail organizations selling products. Research has consistently shown that Internet users love photos and videos. An accounting firm might not make as much headway in this forum. Not that it would be impossible, but how many exciting accounting images can you recall?
At the other hand retail outlet is one of the best types of stores to go live on Instagram. How often your store portfolio changes? With all the micro seasons, and main seasons, off-seasons and other fashion events you can advertise yourself whole year round with minor breaks that are usually not longer than a few weeks. From New year to Christmas there will be a lot to be shown. And should you have a good looking employee you can arrange them into your products and show real-life examples of your portfolio that will catch not one eye.
Using real people with your portfolio then increases greatly your chances of people shopping and returning for more once they realize that you value your staff sufficiently to place them onto company profile and that they can meet these mini stars in person in your store.
Tik Tok
TikTok, known in China as Douyin, is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service. The social media platform is used to make a variety of short-form videos, from practically any genre from dance to comedy, and education, that has a duration from 3 seconds to 1 minute.
Tik Tok's popularity exploded and made Tik Tok one of most fancy social networks on market with more than 800 million active users.
Here are some other interesting Tik Tok statistics:
- The TikTok app has been downloaded over 2 billion times on the App Store and Google Play.
- 41% of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24.
- When it comes to the daily time spent on TikTok, users spend an average of 52 minutes per day on the app.
- TikTok is available in 155 countries, and 75 languages.
- 90 % of all TikTok users access the app on a daily basis.
- In less than 18 months, the number of US adult TikTok users grew 5.5 times.
- TikTok reached an average number of more than 1 million videos viewed every day.
Learn more about Tik Tok in this overview by Wikipedia.
What type of business should be on TikTok? As you could have guessed, it is again retail store that would have much more benefits in comparison to its accounting counterpart here on TikTok. Accounting B2B company would struggle here with seeking B2B clients and its audience is mainly in India and worldwide being aged 16 - 24 it is unlikely this would be a good place to look for a potential company in need of accounting services. It is not impossible, yet this isn't the most efficient channel to advertise accounting services.
Retail store on the other hand has a major advantage that it can repurpose content from other social media like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook video and even LinkedIn. Always new collection of garments in a store would supply store with a great supply of material to produce images and videos on daily basis.
There Are Many More
That the list of social media is getting long? Well, yes, and no. The complete list of social media channels and their use would take a couple of books, so let us list only a couple more important options for you to consider when entering with your business to this interest and the hyper-competitive world of social media advertisement.
- YouTube
- vKontakte
- Snapchat
- Messenger
- Baidu
- YouKu
- QZone
- Viber
- Discord
The list is virtually endless, so we end it here. Good advice at the end. Pick one SM you wish to test first on your audience, do proper research whether your audience is present in the channel, and start slowly and expand. Since one of the best practices is to get into this routinely, regularly and reutilize and repeat good content, starting small and expanding is the best strategy for almost any small business owner to choose.
