Social media platforms are widely regarded as the most important marketing arenas for businesses to target today. Any business that is hoping to launch their brand into the stratosphere will need to learn to embrace social media platforms and utilize them to their full potential.
Below is a list of the most important social media platforms for businesses to be targeting in 2020. If you want to utilize social media to leverage your brand and promote your business, these are the platforms you need to focus on.
Facebook is the largest social media site in the world by quite a considerable margin. At the end of Q4 of 2018, the site had 2.32 billion monthly active users. There is a reason that Facebook is regarded as ground zero for many business’s social media marketing, in much the same way that Google is considered the epicenter of all SEO efforts. The sheer weight of users on the platform means that any business marketing on social media simply has to pay attention to Facebook.
Despite something of a youth exodus in recent years, it is still true that most of those who have social media accounts will have a Facebook account. Facebook is certainly large enough to justify a significant portion of your social media marketing efforts.
One of the benefits of Facebook for marketers is that it supports a diverse range of content types. Other social media platforms are geared heavily or exclusively towards specific types of media and certain types of content. Facebook is different in that it supports long-form text posts, short text posts, and even multimedia posts.
As well as using Facebook to showcase your best content, if you want to get the most out of the platform then you will need to engage with your followers. If you can establish a regular upload schedule, uploading worthwhile content on a regular and consistent basis, you will find it much easier to establish a loyal audience.
Instagram has stood out as the rising star of the social media landscape for the last few years. Instagram remains one of the fastest-growing platforms out there and has become increasingly important for social media marketers. While Instagram can’t boost the user base quite as much as Facebook’s, as of June 2018, it has crossed the one billion monthly active users milestone.
Unlike Facebook, Instagram is focused entirely on visual media. Users can always produce written content and then upload it in the form of an image file, as many do. However, if you want to market effectively on Instagram, you will need to stick almost entirely to images and videos.
Utilizing Instagram to its full potential is all about understanding what kind of content your audience wants. But just churning out desirable content is not going to do the job. You also need to communicate with your audience, not just throw content at them.
Twitter is another one of the biggest social media platforms in the world and is quite an unusual beast. While every social media platform is different, Twitter sets itself apart from the rest in a number of different ways.
For one thing, there is the Twitter character limit, the defining feature of the site. All Twitter posts must contain no more than 280 characters, with the average tweet consisting of just 33 characters.
Twitter also requires a different approach from marketers. Unlike other social media platforms that are well adapted for sharing content directly, Twitter is better for sharing links to content that has appeared elsewhere. This doesn’t necessarily have to be your own content; Twitter is a fantastic way of sharing links to any news coverage regarding your brand or business.
LinkedIn is a social media platform that is aimed exclusively at professionals. This is the leading social media platform among a B2B audience and remains far and away the best social media platform for professionals looking to network. LinkedIn has grown at an impressive rate, and while its 610 million active users may pale in comparison to Facebook’s numbers, LinkedIn is targeting a much more restricted demographic.
As well as being an excellent place for professionals to network with one another, LinkedIn is also the perfect platform for businesses whose primary target audience is other businesses. If you are going to get the most out of LinkedIn as possible, you need to both use the platform to promote your business and to engage and interact with other professionals.
On other social media platforms, the majority of other users are consumers, whereas you are a business. LinkedIn changes this dynamic because both you and the other users on the platform are businesses or freelancers. This means that you need to rethink the way that you engage with other users and the kind of content that you upload.
While you should definitely use LinkedIn to showcase the content you think most likely to entice other businesses to work with yours, you should also use the platform to display your resume. Another business or potential employer visiting your LinkedIn page should instantly be able to get a feel for exactly who you are and what your professional history is.
Reddit is one of the few remaining social media sites that enables its users to remain anonymous. Reddit is divided into different communities, known as subreddits. Each subreddit on the site is dedicated to a different subject and users can subscribe to the subreddits that interest them the most. Many people use Reddit as a news aggregator, but it is also a potentially very powerful marketing platform for businesses.
With more than 1.5 billion users on the site, Reddit is a fertile ground for marketers to exploit. For many businesses, starting their own subreddit where their users and audience can communicate with them is a good idea. However, before a business has garnered a sufficient following to justify such an approach, it is worth being active in subreddits that are relevant to the niche that you operate in.
The social media platforms above are the most important ones for businesses to target in 2020. If you want to get your brand in front of as many people as possible, these are the platforms to leverage.