Not sure which social media platform is best suited to your business and the audience you want to reach? Here’s what you need to know.
Most business owners understand that social media is an important part of their marketing strategy, for targeting new leads and ensuring customer retention.
Yet for many, maintaining a social media presence is a bit like doing the laundry. It’s time consuming, never ending, and every so often there’s an item you have no idea how to wash so you just stick it in the machine and hope for the best.
With so many social media platforms operating, each with their own ever-changing algorithm and demographics, the pressure to post regular great content can be overwhelming.
However, savvy marketers will tell you that successful social media strategies aren’t so much about quantity – it’s about using a few and knowing how to maximise their impact.
Not sure which social media platform is best suited to your business and the audience you want to reach? Here’s a rundown of what you need to know.
Having a social media presence on Facebook is like having a stall at the busiest marketplace in the world – but bigger.
Currently, Facebook has 2.91 billion monthly active users, which is why it is considered essential for all the major international brands.
But did you know that 74.7 per cent of the entire Australian population is on Facebook? If you’re selling to a local audience, that statistic should make you sit up and pay attention.
Facebook has a slightly smaller male audience than female – 45.3 per cent male, to 54.7 per cent female.
While Facebook has the reputation for being an older person’s social media platform, the largest age cohort in Australian users is actually aged 25-34.
Facebook users are also cashed-up, with an estimated 75 per cent of Australian high earners using the platform.
While these figures may have you rushing off to set up a Facebook account, it’s worth remembering that every business has had the same idea. It’s a saturated marketplace and it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.
The last couple of years has seen a sharp decline in the use of Twitter, attributed largely to misinformation around the USA election, the COVID-19 virus, as well as vaccinations.
While the platform had about 313 million users worldwide in 2016, by 2021 it sat at 217 million.
This isn’t to say that Twitter is a dying social media platform, it just means the users are more targeted and brands need to engage in a more nuanced way.
The largest age cohort using Twitter is 25 to 34 years old (38.5 per cent), with 70.4 per cent male and only 29.6 per cent female.
As a social media platform, Twitter’s greatest strength and its greatest challenge is its conversation-based structure. It allows brands to deeply connect with customers in real time, on topics that are trending right now.
It also means that the account needs to be monitored around the clock, with someone responding to comments and posting about events quickly, making it more labour intensive than other social media platforms.
Humans are visual beasts – images have a greater and more lasting impact than words on a web page.
For brands that have a visual or aspirational offering, an image or short video on Instagram can be really powerful.
According to search engine marketing firm Semrush, Instagram has an eye-watering 2.9 billion total visits per month, making it the seventh most-visited website in the world.
It’s constantly growing its popularity by rolling out new features, including those which encourage collaboration and enable website click-throughs.
Instagram is the fourth most popular social media platform, sitting behind Facebook, Youtube and WhatsApp.
Instagram’s biggest age group is broader than its competitors, with 18 to 34 year olds making up the biggest group. They’re predominantly female city-dwellers, with medium to high incomes.
LinkedIn is a niche social media platform, targeted at career professionals. It has about 830 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.
Slightly more men than women use LinkedIn, with about 57 per cent identifying as men, and 43 per cent as women.
Most users of LinkedIn are in the early stages of their careers, with almost 60 per cent aged between 25 and 34 years old. That’s something to consider when thinking about the audience you want to target.
It’s like an old-school pin board or storyboard except it’s online, and Pinterest is loved for its ability to allow users to develop ideas using visual aids ‘pinned’ to boards.
Popular categories include fashion, food and homewares, and it’s the one social media platform that is predominantly favoured by women – 77.1 per cent of users are female.
The Pinterest demographic is spread pretty evenly across the ages: 32 per cent are aged 18-29, 35 per cent are aged 30-49, and 38 per cent are aged 50-64.
If your brand is highly visual and you’d like to target a predominantly female audience that lives in urban and suburban areas, then Pinterest may be a good fit for your brand.
YouTube
Video is huge in the marketing world right now. This is due to users showing a preference for video content over words on a website, as well as video being rewarded by social media and search engines.
YouTube is the pioneer video sharing platform and remains the leader in video content by regularly introducing new features such as Shorts, Live streaming, Chapters, Premieres and Community Tab.
According to Statista 2022, more than 2.6 billion people around the world use YouTube at least once a month, and the social media platform is actually the world’s second largest search engine, behind Google.
The majority of YouTube users are aged 15-35 and the male-female ratio of YouTube viewers is 11:9.
Snapchat
It started off as a fun little app that let kids play around with doggy-face filters, but since it launched in 2011, Snapchat has become one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.
Snapchat has 319 million daily users worldwide, with females making up 54.4 per cent.
It’s no secret that Snapchat is a young person’s social media platform. Users aged 15-25 make up 48 per cent of users; those aged 26-35 make up 30 per cent of users; people aged 36-45 form 18 per cent; while those aged 56 and older make up just five per cent of the platform’s users.
A couple of things worth noting about Snapchat: according to the company, most of its use happens when people are going somewhere, such as on their daily commute, and that a large number of users say they engage with the platform when they are with friends.
TikTok
The newest kid on the block, TikTok allows people to make and share video content.
In 2021, TikTok announced that there were one billion users worldwide, and about 43 per cent of them are aged 18-24. About 57 per cent of TikTok users are female.
TikTok’s strength is increasingly revealing to be its shareability. For example, Jennifer Lopez recently posted the same video on Twitter and TikTok. The video on Twitter got 2 million views from 45 million followers, while the video on TikTok got 71 million views from 5 million followers.
What’s the best social media platform for your business?
With so many social media platforms available, each with their own demographic and each requiring particular content, your social media strategy needs to be created by a professional who understands each platform, how they work together, and where and how social media fits into your marketing mix.
Assemblo is a full-service marketing agency based in Melbourne and are specialists in social media marketing.
To find out how we can help your business with social media, give us a call on (03) 9079 2555 or send us a note via the contact form below.