Top Social Media Sites to Consider for Your Business

Whether you are a seasoned social media marketer, a marketer looking to venture into social media marketing, or a business owner looking to leverage on social media, it’s helpful to know the most popular social media sites around. This will allow you to maximize your brand reach on social media, engage with the right people, and achieve your social media goals.

Of course, it isn’t only about the size of the social media sites. It’s also whether the social media site is a right fit for your business and you. Does it fit your brand image? Is your target audience using that social media site? How many social media sites can you manage at once?

To make things easier for you, I did some research and compiled information about the top social media sites in 2020. Some will be familiar to you, others might sound foreign to you. It might be worth reading more about the social media sites that might be great for your brand but that you have not explored.

Facebook – +2.41 billion MAUs

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Facebook is number one on our list of the top 10 social media sites for business. With 2.41 billion daily active users, Facebook is the most widely used social platform.

Facebook’s wide user base and demographic of users is the main reason it’s at the top of our list; almost anyone can find their target audience on this platform and get in front of them.

You may be thinking, “Okay, so my target audience is on Facebook, but how do I make sure they see my business page?” The answer is Facebook advertising (and a lot of great content!).

Facebook’s advertising platform is by the far the most developed of all of the social media platforms (yes, even out performing Twitter and other channels that have been around a lot longer!).

On Facebook, you can target by age, gender, employment, interests, purchasing behaviors, relationship status and so much more! This gives you the power to target your exact audience and put your ads and content in their newsfeed where they are already scrolling.

Whether your business goal is brand awareness, website traffic, lead generation, or online conversions, Facebook should (and more than likely will) make a notable difference in reaching your goals when used properly.

On Facebook, you have to pay to play, so while your target audience is more than likely using the channel daily, you’ll need an advertising budget to reach them. But even so, many of our clients have seen significant ROI after investing in Facebook ads.

If you’re wondering if Facebook is for you; our answer 9 times out 10 is yes. There are only 2 instances when we may suggest another platform over Facebook: the first being if you do not have a social media advertising budget, and the second being if your type of business is prohibited to advertise on Facebook based on Facebook’s ad policies (i.e. a vaping or tobacco company etc.).

Combining great content and A/B split testing, with Facebook’s extensive, data, user base, and ad platform can be one powerful combination for your business!

YouTube – +1.9 billion MAUs

YouTube is a video platform that allows users to watch videos and/or upload them.

YouTube has 2 billion monthly active users, giving your business the chance to share company content wither over 30+ million daily active users who are likely to watch it.

Similar to Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat, YouTube has the benefit of visual content, but unlike the other social media sites for business that we’ve listed so far, it has the unique stance of being owned by Google!

Because of this, YouTube has access to Google’s advertising platform, and you can use this to your advantage when running YouTube ads.

It also mimics its parent company in that you can optimize the search of your company’s YouTube videos with the proper keywords.

Without having to spend extra money on advertising dollars, you can make your YouTube videos have higher search rankings by including the searched keywords in your title, video description, and actual list of keywords in the keywords tool.

WhatsApp – +1.5 billion MAUs

WhatsApp is a messaging app used by people in over 180 countries. Initially, WhatsApp was only used by people to communicate with their family and friends. Gradually, people started communicating with businesses via WhatsApp. (When I was in Bangkok to buy a new suit, I communicated with the tailor via WhatsApp.)

WhatsApp has been building out its business platform to allow businesses to have a proper business profile, to provide customer support, and to share updates with customers about their purchases. For small businesses, it has built the WhatsApp Business app while for medium and large businesses, there’s the WhatsApp Business API. Here are some stories of how businesses have been using WhatsApp.

Instagram – +1 billion MAUs

Instagram comes very close behind Facebook and is number three on our list of social media sites for business. Instagram is owned by the same person who owns Facebook, and has 500 million daily active users.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, saw so much potential in the platform and the benefits of Instagram that he bought it out just 18 months after it launched for $1 billion, and the platform has continued to grow since.

Because Instagram is owned by Facebook, it has access to the same extensive user base and advertising platform just like the Facebook Messenger app does.

So Instagram has all of the same paid benefits of Facebook, but Instagram also has its own set of organic benefits.

When we use the term “organic,” we mean functions you can perform or results you can achieve without directly paying for them in advertising dollars.

On Facebook, you have to pay for advertising campaigns to grow your followers and increase the reach of your page and posts. On Instagram, you can grow your followers organically and therefore grow the reach of your profile and posts organically as well!

This makes Instagram a great option for both businesses with and without an advertising budget.

Pinterest– +250 million MAUs

Pinterest is a place where people go to discover new things and be inspired, quite unlike most social media sites where engagement is the primary focus. According to Pinterest, 78 percent of users say that content on Pinterest from brands are useful (much higher than that on other sites). This gives your brand an unique opportunity to shape their purchasing decisions.

As Pinterest users want to be inspired to try or buy new things, having a presence on Pinterest could help put your brand on their minds. Here are some tips on using Pinterest for business that the Pinterest team shared with us.

Snapchat– +255 million MAUs

Snapchat is a social media app that focuses on sharing photos and short videos (as known as snaps) between friends. It made the Stories format popular, which eventually proliferated on other social media platforms like Instagram. But the rise of Instagram Stories seemed to have hindered Snapchat’s growth and marketers’ interest in using Snapchat for their brands in general.

If you are not familiar with Snapchat, here’s our beginner’s guide to Snapchat. Or if you are undecided between Snapchat and Instagram, we wrote a little comparison of Snapchat and Instagram for brands.

LinkedIn– +294 million MAUs

If your business follows a B2B model, or targets consumers based on job titles, then LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for you!

LinkedIn has 303 million monthly active users, most all of which are in the working world or close to it.

Because LinkedIn is considered to be a social media platform for business, people often include more accurate information about their employers, job positions, work email addresses and more than they do on other social media platforms that are utilized more for personal use.

LinkedIn’s advertising platform is not as advanced as Facebook’s in terms of it’s campaign functions, but it does give you a lot more job positions to target than Facebook does. This can be crucial if the bottom line of your business is dependent upon targeting specific businesses or job titles

TikTok– 1.2 billion MAUs

TikTok is a new social media platform that was launched last 2018. It’s an app that allows its users to create their own 15 second video clip and share them. Now it has 1.2 billion users worldwide with 500 million monthly active users. With these figures, it has now surpassed Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat – platforms which are obviously older.

However, although it has so much potential capturing the attention of Gen Z, it still has a long way to go when it comes to advertising. The only way for marketers to use this platform for advertising is through influencers. And since it is still not that saturated compared to other social media giants like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, a lot of brands now are using it to reach Gen Z – a market that seems quite hard to reach.

Twitter – 335 million MAUs

Twitter is one of the older social media platforms, and it has 336 million monthly active Twitter users. You can post photos and videos along with character-limited copy, but Twitter is most known for its feed of real-time updates. Is the term “live-tweeting” ringing a bell now?

Twitter is also great for engaging new potential customers through its use of hashtags. Similar to Instagram, you can search a hashtag and find other posts from consumers and businesses alike that have used that hashtag.

This means that you can find consumers searching for something that your company offers and vice versa!

For example, if you’re a car wash company, you can literally find people tweeting about how they need to get their car washed depending on how they’ve used hashtags in their tweet. You can then tweet them with a discount for your car wash, and wa-la, you’ve most likely got a new customer.

Some of others are-

tumbler

Facebook Messenger.

WeChat.

Reddit

QQ.

Baidu Tieba

Quara

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