Social media provides businesses with unique opportunities for effectively reaching their target audience and having their presence noticed. It is advertiser heaven because they can now easily attain the following advantages.
- Improved their brand awareness
- Driven quality inbound traffic to their website
- Improved the visibility of their content
- Seen a reduction in their marketing costs
- Have an increase in their conversion rates
If you haven’t already advertised on social media, check out these top 6 social media platforms that could help you effectively advertise your business. These social media platforms will stay on top of their game in 2022, so this list is perfect for people who want to start advertising on new platforms!
PLATFORM 1- FACEBOOK
As of January 2022, Facebook sees over 3.58 billion worldwide active users in a month! These users spend over 58 minutes every day scrolling through brands, memes, and videos on the platform. The time that these users spend on the platform is higher than any other, making it perfect for advertising.
KEY DEMOGRAPHICS OF FACEBOOK
- 18.85% males and 12.8% females users are aged between 25-35 years ( largest demographic)
- 23.8% are users aged 18-24 years
- 4.6% of people aged 65+
- 44% females and 56% males
What makes Facebook perfect for advertising?
- It provides a detailed analysis regarding the performance of your ads through Facebook’s built-in Ads Manager.
- It creates objective-specific ads in terms of website clicks, post engagement, etc.
- It has a higher click-through rate.
- Facebook has a feature called the ‘call to action button’ that can be customized to fit the preferences of a business. This button has the power to effectively engage your customers/ followers and encourage them into buying, following, downloading, signing up, or applying now. ( These are the options of CTA or call to action buttons available on Facebook)
- It has superb targeting abilities and narrows down the target audience through location, age, language, behavior, or their interests, thus eliminating any unwanted user.
- The ads you put out on Facebook can have a carousel of images/ videos, static images, just videos, a mobile-centric collection, and a loop of 10 images that provide a clear insight into your brand to new users.
Its best feature to make use of in 2022-
- The ‘Customer Journey’ feature maps out the journey a customer makes to reach a landing page and eventually purchase.
- Chatbots to actively engage with customers.
PLATFORM 2- YOUTUBE
It is currently the best video-sharing platform, with 2.291 billion active users in a month. The users of this platform spend an average of 29 minutes and 37 seconds viewing content. In addition, it has been reported that YouTube videos influence buying decisions of 80% of shoppers, which makes it worth using.
KEY DEMOGRAPHICS-
- More than 70% of YouTube video viewing takes place through mobile phones.
- Globally 50% of its users are females.
- India is one of the highest consumers of YouTube videos.
( Image courtesy- https://backlinko.com/youtube-users )
- Millennials and Gen Z’s are the highest consumers of video content on YouTube in the USA.
( Image courtesy- https://backlinko.com/youtube-users )
What makes it perfect for advertising?
- The ads run on the platform can be created in a multimedia format.
- Advertising on YouTube can be extremely detailed and allows targeting of the audience through customer match, topic, similar audience, demographics, life events, custom affinity audience, etc.
- Videos are more engaging and thus make it easier to leave a lasting impact on the audience.
- It provides a quick analysis regarding advertising campaigns through the platform’s ‘Analytics’ feature.
- It provides faster results in increased website traffic, ad clicks, and sales.
- YouTube offers a variety of ads to choose from, like masthead ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, and video discovery ads.
Its best feature to make use of in 2022-
YouTube has been heavily promoting its ‘YouTube Shorts’ feature. The format is quite similar to that of Tik-Tok videos.
( Image courtesy- https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/youtube-shorts-global-launch-1235018403/ )
PLATFORM 3- WHATSAPP
Whatsapp is a messaging app that has seen major changes after Facebook’s purchase. The platform is being used to communicate with businesses via their whatsapp business app. As of October 2021, the app has seen a monthly influx of 2 billion monthly active users.
What makes it perfect for advertising?
- It helps build loyal customers as 55% of the population feels closer to the brand if they communicate through messaging apps.
- Adding a direct messaging app to your strategy will make it easier for customers to reach you.
- Allows sending automated messages to potential customers regarding new discounts, products, or sales.
- Over 66% of people feel extra comfortable making purchases from a brand/ business that provides a phone number active on a messaging app.
- The advertising cost is minimal on Whatsapp.
PLATFORM 4- INSTAGRAM
The platform is a video and image-sharing social media platform that sees an average of 1.39 billion monthly users. It is popular for its fascinating features like stories, reels, IGTV videos, and Instagram Live. Instagram is one way to boost business brand awareness by doing an Instagram promotion for your products. This will be great for the visibility of your business across the globe.
KEY DEMOGRAPHICS-
Globally, the platform has 17.9% male users aged 18-24-year-old and 13.1% females.
( Image courtesy- https://www.statista.com/statistics/248769/age-distribution-of-worldwide-instagram-users/ )
What makes it perfect for advertising?
- Instagram and Facebook are interconnected. Hence users can customize the optimization campaign like Facebook ads.
- The ads on Instagram are 58 times more engaging than any other platform and thus more likely to convert into purchases.
- The ads are not intrusive and end up looking like a regular post.
- You can use the story ads to leave the watchers curious about the brand. The curiosity stems out of the ads being live only for 24 hours.
- It helps create highly targeted paid ads by applying filters like location, demographic, behavior, etc.
- Instagram provides real-time tracking of the ad campaigns to make businesses aware of how many leads or sales they received.
Its best feature to make use of in 2022-
- The Instagram ‘shopping’ feature allows making purchases on the app instead of directing to a website.
( Image courtesy- https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-trends/ )
- Reels! They are addictive and unlike IGTV, have the perfect format that makes it easy to watch videos on mobile phones.
PLATFORM 5- Tik-Tok
This video-based social media platform is comparatively younger (launched in 2016) than most platforms in this list but has garnered a whopping 1 billion monthly visitors.
KEY DEMOGRAPHICS-
- Almost 50% of the TikTok users are under 35 and in the United States.
- Over 60% of the population consuming content on the app are females, and the remaining 40% are males.
- It receives 535 billion views on entertainment content alone and about 181 billion on dance videos.
What makes it perfect for advertising?
- Their newly launched feature allows brands to run solo ads without partnering with content creators.
- The content creation process is comparatively easy because of its in-built editing tools.
- Tik-tok can help create ads that match the brand image better by using advertisement styles like top view, brand takeover, and in-feed.
- The platform runs heavy on influencer marketing and advertising! Using them can help businesses build trust amongst their target audience.
Its best content style to make use of in 2022-
- Rise of ‘Episodic content’ or back-to-back episodes much like TV shows. This content style is gaining popularity and is known to keep the followers hooked.
- Rise in challenge style videos that encourage people to use a particular hashtag or produce similar content.
PLATFORM 6- FACEBOOK MESSENGER
Messenger was initially a part of Facebook; however in 2011 messenger became a separate messaging platform that sees 1 billion monthly visitors. In addition, it recently launched the ‘Messenger ads’ feature that allows customers to communicate with businesses by just clicking on a button.
One of the reasons that make Facebook messenger important to use for advertising is that it is one of the quickest ways for interactions between brands and customers.
What makes it perfect for advertising?
- Messenger ads like destination, home section, and sponsored ads can be launched to increase interactions apart from sales.
- Messenger ads don’t send customers to a landing page. They engage without forcing them to make a purchase.
- You can send carefully crafted sponsored messages to a customer’s inbox. This reduces the risk of a bounce and strategically keeps the user engaged with the brand.
- It will encourage organic conversations with customers to take place and allow trust-building
Wrapping up
Advertising on social media is a sure-shot way to find prospective customers online and effectively advertise yourself to them. These social media platforms have a massive reach and could help businesses reach customers who are in close proximity and also those who live in a different country.
You can choose from either of the 6 options mentioned above and give their advertising capabilities a good read before you do so.
