By Pamela Bump
Source: Hubspot
Updated: July 21, 2021
Published: December 07, 2020
Photo Source: Unsplash, Joshua Hoehne
Individuals use social media to express themselves, discuss their interests, connect with friends, and grow their careers. Different social media platforms are used for specific purposes. For example, expressing creativity is most common on TikTok or Instagram; promoting one's career is common on LinkedIn.
The list of social media platforms is growing, and well-known platforms like Facebook are always evolving and adding new features. With a greater and greater need for a social presence and an overwhelming amount of platform choices, it can be hard to pick which social channels to use.
You might not want to spread yourself too thin by managing a channel on every imaginable platform, but you also don’t want to miss great brand-awareness opportunities.
To help you make informed decisions about which platforms to use, this post will guide you through some of the core types of social media, examples of platforms within each category, and the pros and cons that each type might present. By the end, you should have a much clearer idea of what kind of social media strategy will work for your business.
Types of Social Media
Social Networking
Photo Sharing
Video Sharing
Interactive Media
Blogging/Community Building
Social Networking
Examples of Major Platforms
Facebook: 2.6 billion monthly active users
Twitter: 166 million daily active users
LinkedIn: 160 million users in the U.S. alone
Social networking is possibly the most traditional form of social media.
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are often called “networking” platforms because they allow user accounts to interact with each other in a variety of different ways.
Professional Uses
If you’re a small business, like a restaurant, a platform like Facebook could be a great place to start your social strategy. With Facebook, you can build a business profile that includes links to your website and details about your menu.
Once your profile is all set up, you can post regular updates about your business, “like” other pages, and answer customer post comments or messages. Business profiles also allow other Facebook users to give you reviews.
For companies looking to offer a professional service, B2B or publishing companies, LinkedIn is another great way to grow your following. LinkedInemphasizes career-related networking.
Brands looking to build an audience of professionals from a certain industry can create a business profile there, categorize it with an industry type, and then use posts and messaging to publish updates. They can also use messaging and comment features to interact with their audiences, or users who comment on their posts.
A Twitter account could be helpful to companies in a wide spectrum of industries, from entertainment to e-commerce. This platform similarly allows you to create a profile where you can list and link company information.
You can then use Twitter to post about company updates, tag companies or customers in posts, retweet positive customer tweets, and respond to customer questions via tweet or direct messages. Like Facebook, you can also post content like photos or videos.
On all three networks, users can easily communicate with others through simple actions like tagging, hashtagging, commenting, private messaging, reacting to posts, and re-sharing content.
Aside from social interaction, newsfeeds on common social networking platforms are designed to show off a mix of text and visuals, rather than one primary content type.
This flexibility makes social networking platforms easy to begin a social strategy on because you can experiment with different forms of content before branching out to platforms that require more specific content types.
For those who want to dabble in video or graphics, these platforms could be a great place to test this new content. With the growth of video marketing, many have begun to launch more advanced features like Facebook Stories and Twitter’s live streams.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have also started to encourage native video and photo uploads more heavily. Recently, Facebook even adjusted its algorithms to favor live video and image uploads. This has caused these types of native content to gain greater user engagement.
If you’re still not sure where to get started, check out our beginner’s guides for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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