Social Media 101: How Social Media Platforms Help Business

If you haven’t learned by now, social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Minus the hiccups with Facebook and their recent outage, social media has proven its efficacy for being a great way to market your business. With literally billions of social media users, showing up on social media is worth the time, effort and money it takes to show up consistently, bring value to your industry and target audience and be included in your content marketing plan.  

Benefits of Social Media

While social media has become a staple for many businesses, there are still many out there that have found they are able to reach their goals without much of a social media presence. But the fault in that lies within reaching younger generations (who increasingly have more spending power than some of their older generations). To fool-proof your business’s staying power, one must learn to include social media marketing, adapt to its iterations and continue to find ways to reach their target audience.

When researching your target audience, did you take into consideration where they may be? Over half of consumers say that they learn about a brand on social media. That being said, there is a good possibility that the majority of your target audience can be found on social media. Showing up on social media can help you develop a rapport with your target audience, position your business as a thought leader, help increase your website traffic, generate leads, learn about your competition, assist with reputation management, receive higher conversion rates, increase brand loyalty and more! And most importantly, much of what we just mentioned can cost you very little. 

The Top 8 Social Media Platforms 

Now that we have your attention, we understand that determining which platforms are going to work best for your business and align with your target audience can be a little daunting. So we decided to break it all down for you. Each of these social media platforms have evolved over time, giving us the opportunity to let you know what each of these social media platforms are doing as of 2021. For our purposes, we will focus on what’s most popular in the United States. We are breaking down Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and YouTube by how they function best today for businesses social media.

If you’re feeling a bit unfamiliar with which of these social media platforms will work best for your target audiences, revisit our blog on Who’s Your Target Audience and Where to Find Your Target Audience Online.