Social media is important for businesses to implement for several reasons. The most prominent reasons to incorporate social media into your digital marketing plan is when properly utilized, they can ultimately drive more website traffic, brand awareness, and potential lead generation. Other reasons you want to invest in social media is that they can improve your online credibility, and let others get to know you or stay informed about your business.
Picking the right social platforms to use and choosing good strategic posts that highlight important information can help showcase your business favorably as well as provide a lighter side to your business. Maybe you want to introduce your team members, showcase your products and services, share insight about your partnerships, or provide dates to events you are sponsoring or promoting. It could be you want to highlight charities you find important or provide links to internal pages, articles, and blogs housed on your company website, all of which are good concepts to deploy.
There's a ton of opportunities for a business to promote itself when you utilize social media platforms effectively. It just takes a little strategy, planning and implementation. Whether it's Critchfield Consulting doing this for our clients or us providing insight and direction for your team to follow through on, it helps to know upfront what platforms are out there and how they work.
DIFFERENT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AVAILABLE TO BUSINESSES
- FACEBOOK: Statistics show that 3.05 billion people use Facebook and 200 million small businesses around the world utilized the platform in 2023. A great business to business and business to consumer platform with the most users of any other social platform. Here you can run targeted ads and apply dual efforts to both Facebook and Instagram from Meta Business Suite, a tool to allow your business to effectively plan, promote, and track your efforts.
- INSTAGRAM: There are over 2 billion active users on Instagram and roughly 200 million small businesses engaging on Instagram. With Facebook owning Instagram, you can utilize Meta Business Suite to do your monthly planning for posts on both platforms at once making it a great platform for business to consumer posts.
- LINKEDIN: There are over 930 million members on LinkedIn and 58.4 million companies that utilize this platform annually. LinkedIn is a professional business platform for both individuals and companies. Today, with its ability to target advertisements, it's a reliable platform to get your company's messages across as well as identify new potential hires.
- X (FORMELLY KNOWN AS TWITTER): X has, as of 2023, 415 million users on its platform. X is built for short concise posts and instant messaging for businesses and everyday people. Most well-known influencers, models, sports figures, and celebrities utilize this platform to share their thoughts and so do many businesses.
- PINTEREST: Pinterest has 465 million users on its platform. The platform is geared towards consumers and used widely as a discovery engine for finding inspiration like cooking recipes, home improvement, fashion, and style. Users can pick the topics that are of most interest to them when they set up their account and receive a stream of relevant quotes, images and knowledge geared towards their interests. Worth investigating if your business needs some quick brand awareness and has unique products or services that people would have interest in.
- YOUTUBE: There are 2.70 billion active users on YouTube with 122 million visiting the site every day. Not exactly a social media platform for feedback, comments, or interaction, it's one you don't want to overlook especially if you can create videos that turn viral. This platform is specific for video and can be advantageous in its targeting efforts. If your business has video assets, this is where you want them to rest. The platform allows for simple integration and imbedding, meaning videos housed on the platform can easily be added directly to a company website.
- SNAPCHAT: Snapchat sees roughly 406 million active daily users worldwide. This platform is largely used by younger generations. It's a popular app that allows users to exchange info, filtered pictures and videos, often with special effects, that are meant to disappear after they're viewed. Maybe not the best social platform for businesses but success can be had if your business offerings meet the right metrics.
- TIKTOK: TikTok has reached 1.5 billion active users worldwide in 2023. Although somewhat controversial, due to the privacy concerns of its users, you can't ignore how big the platform is growing. Created in China, this popular social media app allows users to create, watch, and share short 15-second videos that are typically generated from web cams and mobile devices.
THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND
Most all these platforms listed offer various bells and whistles for a business to advertise with them on. Basically, for extra money, you can identify and feed your business information to those that are most apt to identify with your ads (your ideal customer type) using the targeting tools and concepts these platforms already have at their disposal. It could be you want to create more brand awareness, business credibility, drive more website traffic, or generate leads to follow up with. Most all these social platforms allow you in depth information about its users to the point you can use advertisements that target demographics that fall within certain categories like age, income, behavior, interests, living locations, associations, and specific job titles to name a few.
Before you choose which route to take, you as a business owner must ask what social media platforms will work best for your industry? Even more important, one should also ask, what platforms can we realistically manage internally? Whether you choose to work internally with your team on this or choose to use a third party to manage your social platforms, like Critchfield Consulting, it's important to create a concise plan that sets your business up for success.
It's worth noting, there is such a thing as over doing a business social media strategy and there's also a caveat that you could be underachieving by not posting anything relevant to your accounts for years. The happy medium, we feel, is a combination of various tactics that include using video, imagery, reels, advertisements, and a targeted number of posts per month on a few strategic platforms only. Of course, the most important key to consider is what platforms would work best and what types of posts you should be making, something Critchfield Consulting is happy to help identify with you together.
GROW YOUR COMPANIES SOCIAL PRESENCE WITH CRITCHFIELD CONSULTING
Working with Critchfield Consulting to help grow your social media presence is easy. With a team of social media experts that have managed hundreds of social media accounts for our clients, we get social media working for your business.
It helps to have a team that can not only manage the workload of posting regularly, but provide important insight into the complexities of running targeted ads that can produce tangible results in our campaigns. Every post that Critchfield Consulting makes for our clients are relevant to your business and never duplicated across multiple client platforms, meaning we spend the time to get to know what is going on in your business so we can customize what to post about.
So often, when businesses work with a 3rd party marketing company, they receive cookie cutter posts that are blasted across the entire agency's customer base. We, on the other hand, make a promise to always be customized to the objectives and growth goals of our clients. We encourage you to learn more about us by reading our customer reviews and seeing some of our client's projects. If you're a business in Kansas City and would like to talk to us about social media marketing, give us a call at 816-718-6617 or send us a direct message here.
