Internet is the air we breathe in the 21st century. With social media chatting, talking in real-time, marketing has been made easy. It was reported by a research firm, Dscout, that an average person touches his phone 2,617 times in a day. The study found that extreme cellphone users meaning the top 10% touch their phones more than 5,400 times daily.
The focus of this article is about how to use social media to market small, medium and big brands, that is Social Media Marketing. This is because fewer brands are aware of the benefits of social media marketing. In fact, 50% of small businesses aren’t using social media to promote their business. That’s an alarming number, even more, concerning is that an additional 25% don’t plan to use social media in the future either.
One of the best reason you should be marketing your business on social media is that your customer spends there time on social media. According to Statista, the number of social network users in Nigeria as of 2018 were approximately 29.3 million and this figure is projected to grow to 36.8 million in 2023.
Common Social Media you can use for Marketing
Facebook – 2.23 Billion Monthly Active Users: it is the biggest social media site around the world, it is approximately the 1/3 of the world’s population, with more than two billion people using it every month.
It is easy to start on Facebook because it supports all forms of media I.e. Multimedia (text, images, video, live, stories.
YouTube – 1.9 Billion Monthly Active Users: YouTube owned by Google is often known as the second largest search engine after Google. It is a video sharing platforms where users watch a billion hours of video every day. To get started you can create a YouTube channel for your brand where you can upload videos for your subscribers to view, like, comment, and share.
WhatsApp – 1.5 Billion Monthly Users: WhatsApp is messaging app used by people in over 180 countries. Initially, WhatsApp was only used by people to communicate with their family and friends. Gradually, people started communicating with businesses via WhatsApp.
You can make use of What’sApp status to post pictures videos and even text to portray what your business is all about and can even chat with your customer with the app.
For small businesses, WhatsApp has built the WhatsApp Business app while for medium and large businesses, there’s the WhatsApp Business API. Here are some stories of how businesses have been using WhatsApp.
Instagram – 1 Billion Monthly Active Users: Instagram is a photo and video sharing social media app. It allows you to share a wide range of content such as photos, videos, stories, and live videos. It has also recently launched IGTV for longer-form videos.
As a brand, you can have an Instagram business profile, which will provide you with rich analytics of your profile and posts and the ability to schedule Instagram posts using third-party tools.
Twitter – 335 Million Monthly Active Users: Twitter is a social media site for news, entertainment, sports, politics, and more.
Twitter is also often used as a customer service channel. According to advertisers on Twitter, more than 80 per cent of social customer service requests happen on Twitter. And Salesforce calls Twitter “the New 1-800 Number for customer service.
Reddit – 330 Million Monthly Active Users: Reddit, also known as the front page of the internet, is a platform where users can submit questions, links, and images, discuss them, and vote them up or down.
Besides, submitting your content to Reddit and participating in discussions, you can also find content ideas and advertise on Reddit.
LinkedIn – 294 Million Monthly Active Users: LinkedIn is now more than just a resume and job search site.
LinkedIn also offers advertising opportunities, such as boosting your content, sending personalized ads to LinkedIn inboxes, amid displaying ads by the side of the site.
Pinterest – 250 Million Monthly Users: As Pinterest users want to be inspired to try or buy new things, having a presence on Pinterest could have put your brand on their minds.
With all been said your business, regardless of size or budget, has an opportunity to grow your audience and reach your objectives through ads on those social platforms.
