Social Media Networks for Business
Social media networks have gained popularity in many markets internationally and have incredible numbers of users who are willing to let themselves be identified by others based on the content they “like” or “follow” on the platforms. It’s no wonder that social media has become one of the most popular means for businesses to advertise, promote, and contact customers. In today’s age of interconnected technology, the question has turned from “should my business be on social media?” to “which social media platforms should my business be on?” and there are plenty of social media platforms for businesses to choose from.
As we learned in class, social media networks are vast in size and a single node can influence and connect to others all around the globe. Businesses can create social media accounts that can quickly grow from tens of interactions with consumers to thousands as each involved consumer’s friends watch the business appear in their information feed. Additionally, when companies participate in advertising auctions to promote their social media pages and let company reach a consumer’s friends of friends or even further, their audience quickly becomes immense.
This article emphasizes how different social media platforms have different focuses and tend to cater to different types of businesses, but it is hard to find any company without representation on at least one of these online networks. Whether a company chooses to focus on the younger audience of Snapchat with almost 4/5 of the 18-24 year-olds in the U.S. or the 68% of adults in the U.S. who have Facebook pages, a social media platform exists with their target audience.
Knowing which social media platform to advertise on to reach that target demographic is not always clear to businesses, but luckily, they have the ability to simply make multiple corporate accounts. While it is well known that Instagram is focused on how things look while LinkedIn is focused on business interactions, a company’s target audience could consist of individuals in both spaces. This sounds like an easy solution but becomes more difficult with other social media platforms such as YouTube which require a significant amount of effort to maintain and create content for which could be a substantial business expense for a smaller firm or startup.
Creating an online community or spreading a business’s content to a cluster that contains members of the company’s target audience is not only a key part of marketing and business-customer interaction today, but will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
Source:
Nirshberg, Yana. “Are You Prioritizing The Best Social Media Platform For Your Business?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 12 Sept. 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/09/12/are-you-prioritizing-the-best-social-media-platform-for-your-business/.