Beyond Facebook: Which Social Media Platforms Should Your Small Businesses Be Using?

Social media marketing for small businesses can be a tricky game. It’s difficult to know how to allocate resources to have maximum effect when there are so many different platforms, with best practices for each.

One question that every small business must face is which channels should or could be used more often—putting aside the obvious choice. When it comes to social media, there is no bigger name in the game than Facebook. It’s the platform with the most users, the biggest reach, and the largest cultural impact.

There may be trendier options in the game—Snapchat, with its burgeoning millennial base, comes to mind—but whether it’s for posting personal photos or for starting a digital marketing campaign, the first choice is almost always Facebook.

But there are tons of other ways to get the word out about your company’s product, great promotion, or new blog post. Which platforms are best suited to helping small businesses gain traction and build social media capital?

Recognize the Power of Facebook

This isn’t a call to abandon Facebook, which would be fruitless. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation is by far the most utilized social media platform of them all, according to the 2017 Wasp Barcode State of Small Business Report. Out of the survey’s 1,100+ respondents, 68 percent said they used Facebook as part of their marketing strategy; LinkedIn ranked second at 39 percent.

Here are the top 10, for the record:

1. Facebook (68%)
2. LinkedIn (39%)
3. Twitter (34%)
4. Instagram (27%)
5. YouTube, Vine, or Vimeo (25%)
6. We do not use social media as part of our marketing strategy (20%)
7. Company blog (19%)
8. Yelp (13%)
8. Pinterest (13%)
10. Live streaming apps like Periscope, Blab, or Meerkat (5%)

Putting aside the 20 percent who say they don’t use social media in their marketing at all, only 12 percent of respondents don’t use Facebook. This number is actually down from the previous year’s report which puts Facebook use at 70 percent. Its usage rate is especially high among mid-sized companies with at least 100 employees—but then again that goes for every platform (very small businesses are more likely not to do social media marketing or to use fewer channels).

Why is Facebook so popular? One reason of course is that it’s approaching 2 billion personal users. As the most popular overall platform, it’s the first place where companies go to spread their brand awareness. And that leads to more marketing-specific reasons such as Facebook drives the largest share of social media referral traffic, has the highest conversion rate for e-commerce traffic, and has an enormous influence on user purchasing decisions.

Smaller Platforms Can Provide Great Value

That’s not to say businesses should put all of their eggs in one basket and concentrate solely on Facebook. That creates concentration risk: If you focus on one area and it fails to produce, you’re in trouble. And since not every potential customer uses Facebook (surprising though that may seem), it’s beneficial to spread your message across other platforms to increase impact.

As to what social media channels are best suited for disseminating a small business’s message, here are a few options:

YouTube

YouTube—and to a lesser extent Vimeo (Vine, included in the survey, was recently shuttered for good by Twitter)—ranks only at number five on the list. YouTube in particular is an undervalued resource for two reasons:

• It’s the second-largest search engine on the internet behind Google Search—well ahead of Yahoo. If you have video content that is optimized for search, you’re creating a whole other avenue for your products or services to be discovered by users.
• Google owns YouTube, and videos are reportedly 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google results than other organic content.

Keep in mind that video production quality is more important than ever, so your content needs to be well-produced (i.e., well-funded) in order to make an impact.

Google+

We’ve all heard the jokes: Google+ is a wasteland, comparatively speaking, in the social media world. You won’t find much argument against that, since engagement and content sharing on this platform is a fraction of what you’ll find on Facebook. But there is good reason to believe that an active Google+ page plays a role in the Google search ranking of your site, which is incredibly important. (Google’s actual proprietary algorithm is unknown, but estimated by many.) Anything you can do to keep your site on the first page of Google results should be done.

In addition, Google+ does have hundreds of millions of users, and some of the platform’s features—such as live Hangouts—can be used to easily share content across all Google channels, including YouTube.

Snapchat and Instagram

These two photo-sharing (and video-sharing) platforms are grouped together here, though they are quite different in terms of the way you utilize them and the audience you’re looking to interact with.

If your audience skews younger, you’ll want to focus on Snapchat, which has a mostly millennial user base. Your content doesn’t need an overly polished or corporate look: Connecting with 18 to 24 year olds means having fun and being creative. There are over 100 million active users on the platform today.

Instagram, on the other hand, has over 400 million monthly users, but the user base is more well-rounded in terms of age as well as geography (meaning a majority of those users live outside the U.S. and thus won’t be prime candidates for buying from you). The content on Instagram should err on the side of professional and artistic, and there’s the added benefit of integration with Facebook.

Yelp

You may not think of Yelp (or other review sites such as TripAdvisor) as social media in the purest sense, but Yelp is actually another great way to connect with users and elicit real (hopefully positive) feedback. If you’re worried about some of the controversy and negativity that has arisen from Yelp reviews, note that the Yelp team is known for helping businesses improve their status on the site and rise above the vitriol.

The truth is the vast majority of consumers let Yelp reviews guide their purchasing decisions. Whether or not you want to play this game, many of your competitors are, so it’s in your best interest to find how to make Yelp work for you.

Choose the Best Platform for Your Business

At the end of the (work) day, different platforms might work better for your company depending on what you sell and who your clientele is. Experiment with these platforms (the Snapchat vs. Instagram debate is sure to rage on for years) or others like Pinterest to see which ones will get you the most traction.

But be warned: It’s not advisable to stretch your message across a bunch of platforms or download every single social media app because you think you need to. Try concentrating on a few to build your audience and cement your brand, and go from there. Good luck.

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