Social media is an interactive way to connect with friends and family on the internet. It is also a place where brands and businesses connect and interact with consumers and potential customers to promote their products or services. Social media is also a platform where individuals and brands share their thoughts, opinions, and content with others. The most famous social media networks are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, but there are many more. These platforms offer various ways for brands to interact with consumers, such as contests, advertising on videos, promotions, etc. They also provide the tools to analyze their performance and shape their marketing strategy accordingly. If you want to know what social media is and what it can do for your brand, here is what you need to know.
What is social media?
Social media is an online platform where people connect and interact. Thanks to the massive popularity of social networks, brands came to an idea to use them as a powerful marketing tool to promote themselves, their products, or services to consumers. There are many social networks on the internet, but some of the most popular are TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Each one has its own concept and differs from another. There are even different growth services available for different platforms, such as Growthoid for more followers on Instagram. TikTok is a social media platform that rapidly grew popular. Users make short, dynamic videos (15-60 seconds long) that are mainly funny and entertaining. Instagram is a social network where people share their photos and videos but also has a Stories feature where people post content that lasts for a limited time (24 hours and then is not available to the public). Twitter is more different from the previous two and is more focused on written content than solely on visual effects.
Massive audience
One of the significant advantages that social media platforms have is their massive audience spread on the global level. There are around 3.2 billion monthly active users on social media networks. Immense numbers of users allow businesses to increase their brand awareness rapidly and on a large scale. The largest social media network is Facebook, with 2.3 billion monthly active users. Most of them are aged between 25-34 (around 31%) and then 18-24 (approximately 24%). Instagram is another globally popular social network whose numbers are constantly growing. There are around one billion users that are active monthly on this social network. Most of them are in the range between 18-34 years old (about 63%). TikTok has around 500 million active users and is also rapidly growing thanks to its entertaining content. Its users predominantly are younger generations: 42% of users are aged between 18-24, 27% between 13-17, and 16% 25-34. Twitter has a more diverse type of audience: predominant age ranges are 25-34 (29%), 18-24 (24%), and 35-49 (23%). Choosing the right social networks can help you target your audience better and find people that are more likely to consume your products or services.
Free marketing
There is nothing better than free service, and every major social network provides one. You can promote your brand completely free and to a vast audience. A dream combination! Still, some companies pay to get boosted on social networks, and paid advertisements keep social networks free for others. Marketing on social networks is still a relatively new concept, and companies still try to find the best formula. However, there are already marketing strategies that prove efficient for both small and large businesses, and many simple methods to increase followers. One of them is user-generated content, in which companies encourage their followers to submit content with the brand’s products. Lush Cosmetics created the #LushLife hashtag, asking followers to share their photos with Lush Cosmetics. That allowed them to generate a lot of great promotional content made by users.
Great for traffic
Social networks are also beneficial when it comes to driving traffic to your website. Sharing your website on your social media networks helps move your targeted audience to the preferred landing page of your website. There are a lot of ways companies share their website links. Posts and ads are essential to achieve that. Some of them include the link in the bio and are constantly visible on their social network profile. Others share links along with the high-quality content, allowing interested users to enter businesses website with one click. More than half (54%) of social network users use it to research products. That means there is substantial potential to drive users from social networks to the business’s website.