Are Social Media Platforms Really That Different?
If you want to compete for and win over more customers, you need to have information readily available where people are looking for it. There are many platforms and outlets for you to share content and connect with your customers, and it’s crucial that you’re present where the people are. Some of the most popular platforms are social media. Sure, you can reach people organically from your website and through email marketing, but to truly reach your target audience you need to utilize social media too. Here are a few ways you can easily utilize different social platforms to build an audience across more channels and connect with more potential customers.
Facebook is great platform because of its versatility. You can connect with a wide range of demographics, share a variety of content, and use different features to be unique and stand out. Let’s start with the demographics. Facebook has 2.82 billion daily users and is the most popular social network for both men and women who are aged 35-44. People who use Facebook are also far more likely to use other social platforms too. 70% of US adults use Facebook and almost 50% of those adults visit multiple times per day.
Not only is Facebook one of the most popular social media platforms, but they have a wide range of business tools and resources you can use for to make your social media marketing even easier. Meta Business Suite provides you access to tools like Messenger - where customers can contact your business privately, Analytics - where you can view data about your content and audience on Facebook, Content Planner - where you can create and schedule posts for Facebook and Instagram ahead to time, and Ads Manager - where you can create paid social media ads to run on Facebook. Meta Business Suite is very large and full of powerful tools that you can use for your business.
Because of Facebook’s popularity and powerful tools Facebook is probably the most important platform for businesses and the best place to start if you’re new to social media.
Instagram is a social media platform that is owned by Meta (Facebook) but has a very different demographic and content style than Facebook does, lending itself to different strengths and weaknesses for your business. Instagram has over 1.22 billion daily users, less than half of Facebook but still a significant number. Furthermore, 70% of people who use Instagram are under the age of 34, meaning that the average age on IG is much younger than Facebook.
Those demographic differences are only part of the Instagram story as the content you’ll see on IG is different too. Instagram is much more visual than Facebook, with the main feature of posts being images, graphics, or videos. Text and captions are much less important which means that you’ll have to optimize your content for IG differently than FB. Another key feature of Instagram is its friendliness towards videos. Instagram has an entire space dedicated to videos called Reels. Videos and gifs are much more compatible and user-friendly on IG than they are on Facebook.
Next up we have Twitter. Now you may have seen Twitter in the news recently, but none of that news really pertains to how the platform functions, so we’ll leave that out today. Twitter has 206 million daily users, making it a much smaller user base than Facebook or Instagram. The age is Twitter users is diverse, but the 25-34 year olds make up 38.5% of users.
The main factor the separates Twitter from other platforms is again the format of the content that you’ll see. Twitter is by far the most conversation social platform, with most content being short bursts of text where users share thoughts, tag and engage with other users and string multiple Tweets together to create longer-form content called Threads. Twitter supports links more effectively than Facebook and Instagram and also supports images very well.
Long story short, if you’re a creator or business who wants to engage with users, customers, and people that are interested in what you do, then Twitter is a great place to communicate and share your thoughts.
TikTok
If you good at making video content, then the newest social media platform is where you absolutely need to be. TikTok launched in 2016 and it’s all about short video content. TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users, making it the 4th most used platform behind Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. TikTok also has the youngest user base with 62% of users under the age of 30. If your business needs to reach a younger audience, this is absolutely the platform for you.
We mentioned this before, but content on TikTok is unlike any other platform. There are no still images and very minimal captions. The reason is because video dominates on TikTok. If you have a knack for creating video, you need to be on TikTok for one very important reason: organic reach.
Have you noticed that your content on Facebook and Instagram isn’t getting as many views as it used to? That’s because organic reach on those platforms is decreasing. Why is it decreasing? More users are creating more content, which means there is more content than other users to view it. That’s not the case on TikTok. Becuse TikTok is so new, there isn’t that overflow of content like there is on other platforms. That means that it’s much easier to get your content seen by other users. That’s won’t last forever though… As more creators join TikTok, organic reach will begin to decrease over time, just like on other platforms.
Wrap It Up
There are many other platforms that we can discuss and you can explore - LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, and Discord to name a few. The main takeaway here? Each social media platform that exists today has a unique set of demographics and supports and different content type best. Because platforms are different from one another, it’s in every creator and business’ best interest to be as invested and diversified across social media as possible. The wider you can cast your “audience net” the more customers you will be able to reach.
Resources
https://www.socialpilot.co/instagram-marketing/instagram-stats#:~:text=Instagram%20has%20over%201.22%20billion,25.31%20%25%20of%20the%20world's%20population.
https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/work/twitter-user-statistics/#:~:text=There%20are%20206%20million%20daily,more%20than%205%2C500%20employees%20worldwide
https://wallaroomedia.com/blog/social-media/tiktok-statistics/