There are a lot of options when it comes to choosing the right
social media platform to use for your inbound marketing efforts.
To help you decide which channels are the best fit for
your social strategy, let's walk through the basics and
benefits of each of them. Let's start with the giant:
Facebook. You may have heard the adage that if Facebook were a
country it would be the largest on earth. That's because it
currently boasts over two billion users - far more than
the largest country, China, with 1.4 billion people living within
its borders. It's likely the majority of people you know are
on the social platform. And even more important to your business,
it's not just for personal use anymore. According to
the Pew Research Center, more than 67% of Americans are using
Facebook as their primary source of news. Millions of companies
use Facebook Business Pages to share organic news, events, talk
to customers and manage highly targeted advertising campaigns.
This means Facebook is potentially going to be one of
the most important platforms to your social media strategy.
There are two types of Facebook pages: a personal page and a
business page. You might have heard organic reach is better on
a personal page, which is true, but there are several reasons
you should use a Facebook business page for your company
instead. First off, Facebook requires businesses to use
business pages and can shut down pages that do not comply with
their policy. Personal pages have a 5,000 person friend
limit, whereas business pages can have millions of followers.
Having a business page also gives you access to analytics
(they call them Insights) and the ability to correctly
categorize your company for search, add a mission statement,
a product catalog, awards, and give your customers the chance
to give reviews. But the most important reason for you to have
a Facebook Business page is for advertising. Facebook
advertising allows you to hypertarget the audiences you
care most about, including your own prospect lists so you can
directly deliver content of value. You can also use Facebook
Advertising across their other services - Instagram, Facebook
Messenger, and WhatsApp. Adding a Facebook pixel on your website
even helps you retarget those visitors with ads on Facebook.
On Facebook, you can publish a variety of content including
text and photo posts, carousel photo posts, and video posts.
You can even do live Facebook videos and share "Stories,"
microcontent designed to disappear after 24 hours,
similar to Snapchat and Instagram Stories. With over 1.3
billion users, YouTube is the second largest social network
and, interestingly enough, it's also the second largest
search engine in the world - behind Google, of course. To
give you a sense of its importance, more than
300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and
almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube
every single day. It's almost mind boggling to think about!
Google reports that 6 out of 10 people prefer online video
platforms to live TV, which means, in many ways, you have
the potential to reach an even bigger audience for a more
affordable cost than on television. On mobile, YouTube
reaches more 18-49 year olds in the US than any cable network.
When it comes to marketing on the platform, YouTube offers a
variety of interesting possibilities. Remember how I
mentioned it was the second largest search engine? That
means not only does it help with SEO, but YouTube also has some
of the highest referral rates of all the social platforms. Also
important, the platform has high conversion rates when it comes
to paid advertising. If you offer a complex product or
service, having great videos can help sway prospects into a
purchase. Creating video isn't always easy or free, but the
benefits and the statistics far outweigh the cost of not
participating at all. So what can you do on YouTube? Not only
can you host original content and have channel subscribers,
it's a great place to syndicate content and to
consider advertising, including interstitial advertising -
short clips that appear before a video. Approximately
20% of the people who start your video will leave after the first
10 seconds. All the more reason to consider allocating resources
to create great content. I mentioned Instagram already, but
let's give it a longer look. It's owned by Facebook, but
the audiences and purposes are a bit different. It's the third
largest social media platform and the fastest growing.
Instagram is a photo- and video-based social network, and
users follow individuals and brands to be delighted by
interesting visuals. Instagram is a younger network,
with 90% of its audience under the age of 35, but even that is
shifting as more and more individuals adopt the platform.
While the primary functionality is sharing photos and videos,
there is another feature rising in popularity. Like the Snapchat
platform, Instagram [Slide 17] Stories enable the sharing of
quick, "instant" photos and videos, often with fun filters
and visual features. Stories disappear after twenty-four
hours for viewers but remain stored in an archive for you to
see or repost again. You'll want to convert a personal
Instagram account to an Instagram business profile to
include a phone number and address in your bio and enable
the "shop" button. And to do that, you're required to have
a Facebook Business page, which you will also need to take
advantage of advertising on this channel. Instagram is important
because it has very deep engagement, especially for
brands. Over 80% of users follow at least one brand
account. Forrester tells us that engagement with
brands on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times
higher than Pinterest, and 84 times higher than Twitter. That
means advertising on Instagram is going to be even more
successful for your business. Sounds like a great reason to
use Instagram, doesn't it? Let's move on to Twitter, the
popular microblogging network. Twitter is the ultimate
by-the-minute news network. It's a place where you can see
what's happening in that very moment around the world, whether
it's someone feeling an earthquake in China or watching
a football game in Boston. Users share messages of up to 280
characters, called "tweets," which can include photos,
videos, links, and animated .gifs. To give you a sense of
the volume of information shared, there are
more than 500 million tweets sent every day. Twitter is a
fantastic place for you to discover what's trending with
your industry, customers, employees, partners, and
prospects. You should be sharing content frequently - more
frequently than on other platforms, in fact - and you
should be engaging regularly with your audience.
Twitter reports that 80% of their advertisers' inbound
social customer service requests happen on Twitter. It's also a
place where people frequently express both pleasure and
dissatisfaction about products and services, making it a
channel your business can't afford to ignore. Twitter also
owns Periscope, a live streaming video channel. Over
350,000 hours of live video are streamed on the network every
day. There are several forms of advertising on Twitter,
including ads in the news stream, with trending topics,
promoted profiles, and a lot more. But one of the best uses
of Twitter is the organic networking you can do directly
with your audience, engaging in conversation that helps build
loyalty and trust. LinkedIn is the platform most
business-to-business, or B2B, marketers are familiar with. It
used to be a network primarily used for recruiting, but these
days it's also becoming a platform to find the latest news
and to stay networked with people all over the world. Now
users can share status updates much in the same way as they do
with Facebook, with photo or video posts that can be shared,
liked, and commented on. [Slide 25]There are several reasons to
use LinkedIn. It's a great way to look up individuals you might
be meeting with, or to find out more about a prospect you're
interested in reaching out to. Additionally, it's a great
place to build thought leadership, to offer value
through targeted advertising, to network in groups, and to share
content that will drive links back into your website
properties. Pinterest is a channel many people think of as
only for business-to-consumer, or B2C, but there are a myriad
of ways B2B companies can take advantage of the platform. If
you aren't familiar with Pinterest, it's essentially a
series of shared, often thematic bulletin boards where users can
"pin" images, video, and links that resonate with them.
What is unique to Pinterest is the average life of a
pin is over three months, whereas on Twitter, a post's
life is a matter of minutes and on Facebook, maybe an hour.
Pinterest pins build SEO with referral traffic - referral
traffic that can directly turn into leads and sales. And while
women used to make up the biggest audience for Pinterest,
that is changing. 40% of new signups are now from men. So,
how can your company use Pinterest? Create a board with
links to your products and services. Or a board with your
blog posts. Or a board demonstrating your company's
thought leadership and awareness. Your HR team can
benefit from a board detailing great things about working at
your company. Consider creating boards for case studies,
employee stories, white papers, or videos. The possibilities are
truly endless. Snapchat is a channel that lost a bit of
market share to Instagram when Instagram Stories launched,
essentially copying the Snapchat business model. But it still has
a strong user base, and it's moving into areas like augmented
reality, which may have exciting applications. Like Instagram
Stories, Snapchat stories disappear after 24 hours. There
are a bevy of filters users can employ to liven up video and
images. Today, brands can advertise with stories more
dynamic and longer lasting than personal snaps. The
Snapchat audience skews young, with its largest demographic
between the ages of 12-24. Whew! There's a lot to learn about
all of the social media channels! Do you need to be on
all of them? Maybe not, but consider that not everyone gets
their news and information in the same way. You might read
online newspapers while I am looking at trending topics on
Twitter. Everyone consumes information differently, in the
time and place of their choosing. You want to be found
in as many of those places as possible. But the good news is
that you can start small and focused, then build as your team
builds and your resource pool grows. And don't be afraid to
create profiles and test out the channels! They can often seem
more overwhelming than they are, and once you dip your toe in the
pool, the water gets warmer and warmer.