20 best social media platforms for business and branding

This is nothing new that social media platforms are now also used as business and marketing media platforms. Social media platforms have become the biggest source of potential consumers and audiences for brands and businesses.

The rapid growth of online business can’t be overstated. Now we can buy anything from anywhere in the world through the biggest online shopping platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, etc. we can order products from sellers whom we have never seen. But the product comes in front of our door after a limited time.

When bigger online business platforms have made it easy to buy products without any restriction, social media platforms have made the process dynamic for local sellers.

Now anyone can sell products on social media platforms and the people who are near them in location or may be interested in the product can get to see it automatically.

Besides, there are so many ways that one can implement a successful online business. In this article, we will show you the 20 best social media platforms to start a new business or go with an existing one. so, let’s see what we have prepared for you.

Contents

What are the best social media platforms for business in 2021?

Those who are intending to start social media based business, most of them are used to asking the question of what will be best to start as an entrepreneur or small business retailer.

Since there are a lot of social media platforms now available, they usually get confused. Moreover, different platforms require different strategies to succeed in your plan.

So, before going to start, analyze social media platforms to determine where your target audiences are, then sketch a strategy and step forward with that. You also have to care for a lot of things while doing business on social media platforms.

However, we will disclose all the necessary social media business tactics in the next part of the article. to know all of them, stay tuned until the end. Now, we will see top social media performers which are good for business integration.

  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • WhatsApp
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Tiktok
  • Pinterest
  • Telegram
  • Discord
  • Medium
  • Tumblr
  • WeChat
  • Viber
  • Line
  • QQ
  • Qzone
  • Snapchat
  • Sina Weibo

Let’s go deeper to realize the best practices to utilize these social media platforms for your benefit.

Facebook

Facebook is at the top of the current social media market share worldwide. With roughly 2.8 million monthly active users, Facebook is now dominating above all social media platforms. Being started as a simple messaging app for Harvard university students, Facebook has all that is necessary for social media application,

In some cases, it is more than regular. Facebook offers a huge opportunity for business starters, digital marketers, and self-reliant entrepreneurs. It has everything you need to reach your online business goals.

You may have heard of ‘Facebook for business’ which is a great offering from Facebook. It allows individuals to create Facebook business accounts and experience the exciting features of it.

More than 80 million businesses integrated Facebook to grow business awareness and the number is increasing day by day. No matter what type of business holder you are, whether it is small or big, local or online, Facebook is the most useful option right now.

There are numerous options that can employ businesses for their own benefits. Like creating pages, advertising, creating marketing campaigns to reach target audience, A/B test, live stream, story, regular posting, and so on.

Not only that, but you can also boost your advertising to engage more and more target audiences, track new goals, adjust your preferences and follow topics of interest as your business grows and your needs change.

Why choose Facebook for business?

Having one-third of the total population as its monthly active users, Facebook is considered the most potential sector for both online and offline retailers. Most people think that online business must require a website and lots of investment.

that’s not right when you have a good hand over Facebook marketing and Facebook business analysis. you don’t need any website nor a huge amount of investment, you can go either organic or paid way to reach your success point.

It provides a boosting option through which you can set your audience characteristics and Facebook will automatically bring you to them. There are even analytic tools to measure your Facebook business performance, your marketing efforts, and how you are doing overall.

However, to succeed with your business on Facebook, here are some tips listed to help for a better starting on your journey.

  • Follow trendy topics, popular demands and provide what actually users want
  • Keep yourself up to date with the latest Facebook algorithm updates so that you can stay one step ahead of your competitors
  • Track your audience, create distinctive brand identity that talks about your business
  • Create page and increase your follower and potential customer base
  • Offer discount, announce give away for specific actions, draw flash sales at the end of the season
  • Create contents that will go viral
  • Engage audiences with daily
  • Always maintain the quality of the product and services to make yourself credible in customer’s eye
  • Also, think about expanding your business

YouTube

YouTube is in the second position of current social media market share worldwide. though, you may wonder to see it in the list as you know YouTube is a video uploading platform that doesn’t include social messaging or something like other social media platforms.

Even then it is considered a social media platform because anyone can create a personal channel, share videos, get subscribers to their channel, and so on. As of April 2021, there are 2.291 billion people who are logged in users and visit YouTube each month.

YouTube is also used as a growing platform for businesses, solo entrepreneurs, small brands, and affiliate marketers. affiliate marketers have a huge chance to get potential consumers by employing user-centric product videos, and encourage them to buy the product from their affiliate links.

Everyday YouTube engaging billion hours of engagement in videos. Whenever we seek solutions to any living problems, the name that instantly comes to our mind is YouTube. It is like a video search engine that provides only video content according to your search term.

If you are wondering how you can integrate YouTube for business purposes, for your convenience, there are a lot of chances to grow up with small businesses on YouTube. just make sure that

  • You are creating engaging video content which has the ability to lift people’s attention to your call to action
  • Try to keep the video length short while making it descriptive and informative for the viewers
  • Optimize your YouTube channel like a website
  • There are SEO practices for YouTube, don’t forget to follow that
  • Create a schedule to stay alert about content management

Instagram

Being a Facebook product, Instagram has a distinct user base who love to use Instagram sometimes more than Facebook. It has over 1 billion monthly active users and they spend 8 minutes on average daily.

Instagram provides a lot of advantages to marketers, brand owners, and small retailers to use this platform to grow their business.

In addition to that, Instagram allows users to create business accounts initially. Also, the business account features unique options that one can get with a personal account.

Research shows that 90% of Instagram users used to follow at least one business or brand profile. This is why more than 30% of B2B is now intended to have a business profile on Instagram and the percentage is way more when it comes to B2C.

Besides, there are also great chances for influencers and affiliate marketers who want to do Instagram marketing and earn through referrals.

How to get started with Instagram marketing?

So, whatever type of business you are, if you are aiming to start Instagram marketing, you can start it from now. But before, you should have a clear sense of effective Instagram marketing strategy. because, without the right planning, you can’t make any benefit through it.

Therefore, make sure that you are following the right track. Here are some Instagram marketing tips to follow.

  • First is first, create a business account on Instagram
  • Set up your business goals based on the type of your business. How do you like to benefit from it? Do you want to create brand awareness, or increase sales on your products? if you like to do influencer marketing, then engaging with more and more people should be your goal
  • Target audience
  • Create captivating image and video content
  • Show your daily presence through story share
  • Use hashtags
  • Use analytics tools to measure success
  • If you have a huge number of followers on your Instagram profile, you can consider sponsor ads. it’s a good way to increase brand awareness as well as get some cash
  • If you are a company, then your goal is to reach more people with your products. for you, it would be great to partner up with influencers to get new audiences and potentials

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is another Facebook product as it was acquired by Facebook in 2014. it is almost a messaging platform that provides the most comfortable messaging experience across web and android platforms.

As business success highly relies on communication with partners, employees, consumers, and new audiences. Both small and giant businesses require an easy to communicate option to save their time and to monitor all the activities properly.

That’s what WhatsApp actually offers to businesses. It has over 1.8 billion monthly active users and every day, approximately 60 billion messages are sent using WhatsApp. It is at the top of popularity in more than 100 countries worldwide.

For instance, India has the most WhatsApp users which are approximately 390 million, then Brazil has 108 million, the United States 75 million, and the UK 30 million. And it has also a large number of users in Indonesia, Russia, Mexico, Germany, and so on.

Being in the 4th position of current social media market share and despite having only messaging options, Whatsapp has great potential for business activists.

It is because consumers feel comfortable buying products from online shops which are great for communication. Thus, WhatsApp offers the best communication channel to keep engaged business retailers with all consumers and workers.

However, WhatsApp is completely free and there is no complex strategy to implement to succeed in WhatsApp marketing. business and brands can easily create personalized communication channels and encourage prospects to communicate through it anytime.

It is proven that WhatsApp has an increased conversion rate for businesses better than any other communication channel. and when you have a better conversion, you have better sales.

How to leverage WhatsApp for business?

There are so many big and small organizations that rely on the WhatsApp communication channel. It is generally used as the destination where consumers come to confirm the purchase.

For instance, you may have arranged campaigns to increase brand awareness, make online and offline advertising to let people know about your existence. In such events, you must have to use a strong call to action (CTA) to drive the audience and interested persons to a specific point, right?

In this regard, your business WhatsApp number will be the best credible CTA that also values your brand.

If you are a business but don’t leverage WhatsApp marketing yet, you should pay attention to it. Here are some tips to enlist into your WhatsApp marketing strategy.

  • Create a particular business channel at first in Whatsapp business, it features some exciting options for business
  • Customize your channel, include necessary information about your business and create brand persona
  • WhatsApp Business has a virtual catalog to showcase products. if you are product retailer, then set your business catalog
  • Set up your business goals and key performance indicator (KPI)
  • Do some online and offline marketing to reach your target audience
  • Share your WhatsApp presence and recommend consumers and influencers to catch you
  • Create contact list
  • WhatsApp is good for customer retention, so don’t miss the point
  • Good communication skill is the key

Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger is an application that comes as integrated with Facebook. If you have a Facebook application on your android device, then you must be familiar with Facebook messenger.

Since Facebook is the platform that offers both messaging and tons of content for entertainment. Users can scroll over their newsfeed seeing videos, images, reading texts and in the meantime, they can chat with friends and families.

Facebook messenger is a distinct application which is only used for messaging. So, you can keep both Facebook and messenger or go with any of them you want.

As we talk about messenger specifically, it has over 2.85 billion active users across the world and 64% of people who use Facebook also use messenger on their devices.

As it is integrated with Facebook, it can be a great benefit for marketers and online retailers. Messenger includes the most versatile messaging experience over the internet. The interface is easy to use, customizable and so interacting as well.

The messenger chat box acts as a strong call to action for Facebook marketing and advertising. Users can easily get you by sending messages on the page and you can instantly reply to them. It also has automated chatbot reply options that enlist AI to reply to consumers’ messages.

The bots are really excellent as they are developed to understand human questions and respond to the most relevant answers.

So, there is no reason to not integrate messenger for online business and marketing purposes. Moreover, research shows that people also love to communicate through messages rather than direct phone calls.

If you are also thinking of leveraging Facebook messenger on your marketing strategy but couldn’t find effective instruction to follow. Here are a few for your convenience.

How to use Facebook messenger in your marketing strategy?

There is no shortage of effective Facebook messenger marketing strategies and planning online. If you search about it, you will get huge blog posts, youtube videos regarding this.

But I would like to recommend you to get some knowledge about messenger chatbots. Chatbots will make your work easier with automated systems so you don’t have to spend half of your day reading consumers’ messages.

Because chatbot will do that on behalf of you. Besides, it will help you with some other aspects to get more traffic, engagement, increase the open rate of your marketing messages, and a higher conversion rate as well.

Chatbot includes messenger marketing tactics like,

  • Chat blasting
  • Comment guard
  • Drip campaigns
  • Chat widget
  • Business system integrations

However, if you are wondering how to start messenger marketing, here are some instructions to follow and integrate into your Facebook messenger marketing strategy.

  • Target audience
  • Build a strong brand presence over Facebook and enlist potential consumers on your messenger contact list
  • Promote hot content through messenger ads
  • Use drip campaign strategy to keep engage your existing consumers
  • Use comment guard on popular posts so that the audience thinks you have eyes on them. comment guard will also help you to get new engagements
  • Set up your personal chatbot at first. there are some great platforms to build messenger chatbot, you can take help from any of them
  • Click to messenger ad
  • Include live chat widget on your website
  • Lastly, use analytic tools to understand how you are doing all the way

Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging social media platform where users can tweet whatever they want within a word limitation. Twitter is constantly upgrading its platform to compete in the present competitive field of social media market share.

Unlike other social media platforms where it’s easy to make brand recognition, go with marketing strategies, and reach success. Twitter marketing becomes a little bit complicated compared with other social media platforms.

With more than 190 million daily active users, Twitter is considered the platform for aged people. Especially industry owners, tycoons, film stars, and business persons are more likely to use Twitter than teenagers and young people.

Statistics show that 63% of Twitter users are between 35 to 65. So, chances are higher to grow up with business on this platform as you know that most of your target audiences are matured.

Maybe this is why 75% of B2B marketers used to integrate it into their social media marketing strategies. Twitter also supports brands and marketers to go on with their activities. It has specific features to help marketers and also includes new features in this regard.

However, if you are new to this platform, then it will seem a little complicated to you. Because Twitter isn’t working the same way as other social media platforms. Therefore, you have to understand various aspects of the platform and then intend to use it for your own benefit.

Now, let’s talk about how we can use Twitter for marketing.

How to create an effective Twitter marketing strategy?

To get success with online business, professional marketers used to assimilate multiple social media platforms and conduct daily activities all over them. Whether you are new or started a few backs ago, you should also include this in your marketing strategy.

It will show your credibility because when audiences will notice that you have active status over all the social media platforms, they feel courageous to make relations with you.

Once you have understood how the platform works, it’s time to step upward. Here are some Twitter marketing tips to follow and practice on your own.

  • Make your Twitter account a reflection of your brand. if you are creating a new account, give attention to include all the required information such as profile photo, header image, bio, website URL, location, etc
  • If you have an existing Twitter account, then you have to audit it at first to check that all the updated features are accessing your Twitter account. you have to audit your Twitter profile, followers, and tweets if you have posted any
  • Auditing your Twitter profile requires tools like Twitter audit. there are some others, choose any of them to auditing your Twitter account
  • Have some garbage old tweets? delete all of them
  • Create brand voice to show professionalism and established a unique presence on followers mind
  • Schedule tweets, you have to monitor followers to understand when they are active and publish tweet in that time frame to get more engagements
  • Use visual contents like images to make tweets more attractive
  • If you have some investment, run ad campaign to get quick result on your goals
  • Create unique contents to drive viewers attention
  • Use hashtags properly

Reddit

Reddit gets huge attention from social media users all over the world and is listed as one of the top 10 social media platforms at present. Though it was developed a long time ago, June 2005. But it has been suppressed because of the huge familiarity of Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube.

Although it is considered a social media platform the interface is different from other social media platforms. Whatever, Reddit is the sixth most visited site in the U.S and as of 2020, it has 52 million daily active users all over the world.

If you think the figure is not so much to get attention as a social media platform to integrate on your marketing strategy, you are in the wrong way.

Reddit is a robust social networking platform that combines web content, social news, forum, and other functionalities. You can share your website contents in text, video, image format and create your particular community, and post about your brand and business.

It has a unique feature called subreddit through which you can create discussion forums on any niche you want.

It is said that whatever topic you have got on your mind, you can find a dedicated subreddit on Reddit about that. There are approximately 2.8 million subreddits visible on this platform.

I love it because it holds all the trendy news and incidents going through the world as well as entertainment posts, creative works, political engagements, and so on.

If you are wondering about Reddit marketing and want to give it a test implementation, then here are some instructions which you can follow to do some better.

How to use Reddit for business marketing?

Same as other social media marketing, you have to understand the platform solemnly to create effective marketing strategy. If you don’t know, more than 35% of B2C marketers use Reddit for their own benefits.

There are multiple ways you can use Reddit to succeed on your marketing goals. You can go through either organic or paid ways to make engagement and increase your brand awareness.

However, if you are new to this platform, you can follow the tactics given here below.

Find your audience on Reddit

As it is a little bit different from other social media platforms, you have to think out of the box. Simply put, you have to go through its unique pace. At the beginning of your Reddit marketing strategy, your first step should be finding where the target audiences are.

To find them, you can search for subreddits that have relevance to your brand and business. For instance, if you are in the fashion business, you can find plenty of fashion related subreddits here. Needless to say that there all the people are interested in fashion and discuss this.

Once you have to find subreddit on your niche, it’s time to interact with the community and let everyone know about your presence. Start posting your own content as well as comment on others’ posts. Create content that has the ability to grab users’ attention and be genuine and humble with others in the community. It will help to increase your credibility.

Quality content

Quality content is the way to get your name on Reddit. You can get huge upvotes sharing quality content and earn karma points also. As soon as you have selected subreddit, you should check what’s going on there every day.

It will help you to realize how you should manage your content for Reddit. If you are going to post articles, make sure that you have added a catchy headline to them. While posting content, keep an eye on the rules of that platform.

Reddit is highly strict about rules and regulations. If you make any mistake, you will get banned from that platform. Some of them prohibit self promotion. Just make sure you don’t violate any group rules.

Posting and commenting on subreddits is the organic way to engage people in your business but if you want to make paid things, then Reddit has the option for you.

In all organic marketing, it takes time and patience to get desired results. On the other hand, paid marketing is the way to have some quick draw on your objectives.

You can make paid marketing by promoting posts and using takeovers. Promoting will keep the post visible for a longer time period. And takeovers offer the opportunity to own some of the top communities of your choosing for 24 hours.

Both promoting and takeovers will help you to increase brand awareness and earn potential engagement from the platform.

Increase karma points

Karma point shows your activity in the Reddit app. it is a legit way to create a positive impression on audiences’ minds as to when they see you have increased karma points. If you want to succeed on Reddit, you have to build up karma points.

Karma points earned through users’ activity. When users post, share links, and comment, they earn Karma points. However, Karma doesn’t have any effect on your posted content, it’s just a showcase of how serious you are on the platform.

AMA

AMA stands for ‘Ask me anything’ on Reddit. It is a unique Reddit marketing technique for marketers to get insight into the audience and get what they would like to ask you about your brand. you can go through this marketing action and widely engage with the community.

TikTok

TikTok is a popular video sharing social media platform developed by a Chinese company named ByteDance. It was launched in 2017, since then its popularity has grown drastically as it has been banned in several countries.

However, it is now available in over 150 countries and as of the first Q of 2021, it has over 1.1 billion monthly active users all over the world. It has 200 million mobile downloads only in the US.

Though it was a user centric application and created to allow people to make fun and entertainment videos and share them with the world. But the huge engagement of users all over the world gets marketers attention to use for marketing purposes.

Thus, many marketers have started integrating TikTok to create individual fan bases for their brands and turn followers into consumers. This is true, you can start TikTok marketing anytime and it is free to create a TikTok account.

You can also get helped by the TikTok influencers as it is a good way to drive traffic to your online store. The developer makes its AL algorithm supportive to influencer marketing as it picks out content according to the user’s preference.

Don’t want to pay for TikTok influencer marketing? Then you may intend to go through your own way of uploading videos and engage the audience organically. Then you have to follow the basics of organic TikTok marketing trends. Below are some examples of them.

  • Create quality content relevant to your niche
  • Show creativity no matter what is your niche, your main goal should be to get users impressions
  • Create marketing content
  • Follow trendy topics going on TikTok and cover videos about them
  • Learn about TikTok hashtag strategy and use it in your own
  • Start unique hashtag challenge
  • TikTok ads

Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the popular image sharing platforms and slightly become one of the important social media marketing sectors for present marketers and advertisers.

It was founded in December 2009 and doesn’t take much time to come to the top of people’s interest. In 2011, Time magazine listed it as one of the 50 best websites of 2011. Let’s see the present scenario of this excellent image sharing social media platform.

As of April 2021, Pinterest has approximately 478 million monthly active users which were 400 million in the previous year of 2020. It illustrates the growth rate of Pinterest at present.

if you aren’t concerned about Pinterest before seeing its name here in the list, you should go for a visit to it right now. If you are visiting it for the first time, you will get to see tons of images related to different niches.

Actually, you can get whatever types of image you need on Pinterest just by searching the image name or particular category on the search box. You can also see animations, 3D graphics, illustrations, etc. they are called ‘Pin’ here.

However, as a Pinterest user, you can upload pins in your profile, can share pins to other social media platforms, and also comment on others’ pin posts. An interesting fact is, statistics show that 6 out of 10 Pinterest users are female.

It is because women love to see pins like home decor, fashion products, beauty products, and other women’s necessaries and used to order directly from Pinterest. There are currently more than 250 million pins. Among them, two-thirds are brand- or product-related pins and recipe-related pins constitute 1.7 billion.

It proves that marketers have a huge chance to grow their brand identity and get potential customers from this social media platform.

How to use Pinterest for marketing?

As an image based social media platform, Pinterest algorithm works differently than other social media platforms like Facebook, Messenger, Twitter. So, you can’t implement the same strategy which you used to integrate with that.

Therefore, before going forward, you have to learn the basics of Pinterest. Apparently, Pinterest seems just an image sharing platform but it has a lot of advantages for small businesses, website owners, product retailers, and so on.

You can create a community consisting of your target audience, share pins about what they are interested in most, and acquire traffic and conversions also.

Once you have got the basics of Pinterest, it’s time to set strategies to get benefits from this platform. Here are some options included to help you in this regard.

  • Get a business account for your Pinterest marketing
  • Grow up with a community
  • Upload fresh and enchanting images on your board
  • Share your content on the other social media platform
  • Don’t forget to add hashtags
  • Get a clear sense of Pinterest keyword strategy
  • Be active and invest time on this platform
  • Promote popular pins
  • Pinterest advertising
  • Analyze your performance

Telegram

Telegram is a feature rich instant messaging software that is free and open source.  It is compatible with all types of devices including computers and tablets. The application was developed by Nikolai and Pavel Durov who are also the founders of Russian social network VK.

Unlike other instant messaging apps like Whatsapp, Telegram provides end to end encrypted messaging, voice and video calling services. So, users don’t have to worry about security.

Users can set animated backgrounds, send text and voice messages, animated stickers, make voice and video calls, and share an unlimited number of images, documents (2 GB per file), user locations, contacts, and audio files.

Having these features, telegram is growing with huge users all over the world. As of January 2021, Telegram surpassed 500 million monthly active users. And the most downloaded app in 2021.

This is why it comes to marketers’ notice and they find it very useful to use to expand business activities online. Telegram has the perfect environment to grow the audience base and convert the audience into consumers.

In the last two years, massive online marketers have intended telegram marketing and a large portion of them made it successfully.

Because of the comprehensive ongoing marketing practices in this platform, it has become a competitive place for new marketers. However, if you want to integrate telegram into your business marketing, you should have a proper telegram marketing strategy.

How to use telegram for marketing?

Telegram is a good option for online marketers to

  • Build up particular audience group dedicated to business
  • Communicate with consumers, audience, offer discounts and promotion
  • 24/7 customer support through telegram
  • Drive traffic to website
  • Share helpful resources among the audiences to engage
  • Take online order

Since telegram is an open source platform, businesses can customize it in their own way. They can also create bots and use them to automate consumer messages replies.

Telegram channels and groups are at the root of telegram marketing. You must have a telegram account and group and channel for your business to engage people and meet your goals. To get started with your telegram marketing, follow the steps here below.

  • Create telegram account
  • Telegram 3 options to go on telegram as a marketer such as telegram group, channel, and chatbot. according to your business and marketing goals, decide the way that is perfect for you
  • Promote your telegram channel on other social media platform and your own website to engage audience
  • Create your own Telegram bot to automate broadcasting and interacting with audiences

Discord

Discord is a community based instant messaging app where users can voice call, video call, text message, and share files in the community. The platform was initially designed for gamers to make person to person communication seamless and effective.

Discord was launched in May 2015. discord works through a server which is a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice chat channels. According to Citron, one of the developers of discord, they made no specific moves to target any specific audience, but some gaming-related subreddits quickly began to switch their IRC links with Discord links.

As an easy to use instant messaging tool, Discord became widely used by esports and LAN tournament gamers. The company benefited from relationships with Twitch streamers and subreddit communities for Diablo and World of Warcraft.

As of 2020, discord has over 140 million monthly active users. With such activities, there must be potential opportunities for marketers to use it for business and increase brand awareness.

Moreover, if you are a brand related to esport and similar niche, you can make it a way to succeed. However, if you are almost new to this platform, you have to understand how it works and then start your action.

To get started, you have to create or join servers. you have the option to customize your server how you want. You can also create channels like creating groups on other social media platforms. You can create a community with your target audience.

In your community, you can share images, video content to engage your audience. You can communicate with community members, offer discounts and organize giveaway events and convert audiences into your website traffic.

If you are a business but don’t focus on this huge potential social media platform, you should give attention to it right now.

Snapchat

Snapchat is another popular person to person messaging platform that encompasses a large number of users on this platform. it also allows group messaging, sharing images and videos with timeline friends, and on the story.

Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, Snapchat message, and content that users share with others disappear after a limited time. But users can see them again as ‘Memory’ in future at the same time day upload them.

Snapchat’s unique side is the offerings of huge image filters and effects. It includes tons of various image filters and effects that users can directly use while taking selfies with its built-in camera. In addition to that, it updates new filters and effects.

As of December 2020, Snapchat had 265 million daily active users. On average more than 4 billion Snaps are sent each day. Snapchat is popular among the younger generations, particularly those below the age of 16.

Therefore, spending your time and attention on Snapchat marketing can be a good investment for a business that is looking to grow.

However, to use Snapchat for business marketing, you have to think out of the box. There are plenty of Snapchat features that marketers can use for their purpose. Besides, the competition is quite less than other social media platforms, so you have more chances to stand out.

How to create your Snapchat marketing strategy?

If you are looking for Snapchat marketing instructions, the below tips will help you figure out this.

  • Set up a business profile on Snapchat. if you want to go through with a personal profile, you can do this. although the only difference between the business and personal Snapchat profile is you can launch paid ads with business profile
  • To grow up, you have to engage with people who have interest in your brand products or services. therefore, target your audience on Snapchat and add them to your friend list
  • Create marketing content that interacts with audiences and able to make buying decision
  • Update your story daily posting enchanting images and videos
  • Offer discount, and create contests to keep followers engaging with your content
  • Increase brand awareness using geofilters in your Snapchat marketing strategy. purchase geofilters and encourage followers to use them in their snaps. so, when they do it, you have automatically increased brand awareness
  • Mention to take screenshots of your snaps that include promo code, it is proven that users respond more if they get discounts on any purchase
  • If you are interested, you can do influencer marketing by sponsoring posts and Snapchat takeover. it will help you to spread out your words through influencers
  • Communicate with follower even personally or locally
  • Share your Snapchat profile on other social media platforms to connect with your existing follower

Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblogging platform which was launched in 2009 and soon became one of the most used social media platforms in China. Many people find it similar to Twitter but in the true sense, Weibo is better than Twitter.

As a social media platform, Weibo includes everything to keep engaged users. Just after 2 years of its launch, iResearch report published that Weibo had 56.5% of China’s microblogging market based on active users and 86.6% based on browsing time.

Right now, it has more than 500 million monthly active users. As a user, you can post microblog within 140 characters. Build a particular follower base, communicate with them through messages, follow celebrities, share images, use emojis, and so on.

Also, it includes a hashtag option which is different from Facebook, Twitter hashtag format. you have to use double hashtags like #hashtag# on weibo. Besides, it features some others such as Vlog, stories, and trending topics.

For marketers, Weibo is a huge potential platform to increase brand identity, attract consumers, make good relationships with them, and so on.

Weibo is available in both organic and paid marketing. But you don’t get enough response going through the only organic way. On Weibo, the average organic post view is around 10%-15%.

More than 55% of Weibo users purchase products and services in China. More than 5,000 companies and 2,700 media organizations in China use Sina Weibo. Whatever type of business you are, if you want to get consistent consumers in Weibo, it’s better you implement paid marketing strategy.

To attract more followers, there are 3 types of paid ad options available on Weibo, they are, sponsored posts, Weibo tasks, and Fensi tong.

Medium

with a weird but impactful name, the medium is now one of the leading online publishing platforms which you may already hear about. Medium is based on online blog content which is a perfect example of social journalism.

The platform was founded in 2012 with an aim to allow bloggers to publish long form articles. Its founder Evan Williams who was previously co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, created Medium to encourage users to create posts longer than the then 140-character limit of Twitter.

However, the medium is overgrowing at the present time. especially, when online marketers including affiliate marketers, service agencies, bloggers find great potentiality implementing marketing tactics on Medium.

Using medium in their marketing tactics drives a proven rate of conversion, traffic, leads, and prospects. It has membership program that includes a subscription option to become a member for a $5 monthly or $50 yearly fee. With a Medium membership, access to “exclusive content, audio narrations of popular stories, and an improved bookmark section” is enabled.

Interestingly, Medium doesn’t publish its official user stats. If you have a website and you want to use medium to drive traffic on it. You should focus on publishing quality content on medium. You can also repost your website content if you think it can engage people.

You can also engage people by sending medium letters to followers, customize your medium profile, and posting quality content on a regular basis on this platform.

Tumblr

Tumblr is another popular microblogging and social networking platform which is much older in the social media scenery. It was launched in 2007 with an aim to create a versatile tumblelogs platform and within two weeks the service had gained 75,000 users.

Tumblr is a growing social media platform that allows users to share contents with images, videos, music, quotes, texts, etc. As a user when you create account on Tumblr, you have owned a particular Tumblr blog where you can post marketing content, educate customers, earn revenues and also you have chance to build up a massive follower base on this platform.

The platform is easy to use. You don’t have a lot of options to manage your Tumblr blog as there are only a few options and you can easily understand all of them.

You can engage people through posts, asking questions, and sharing enchanting content on your profile. It also has an instant messaging function that allows users to send messages to other users.

As of February 2021, it has over 518.7 million, and every day, approximately 200 million blogs used to publish more than 80 million blog posts. One more thing to recognize is that most of the Tumblr users are between the ages of 16 and 34.

So, you have a high chance to engage with the young audience group on this platform. Above all, Tumblr allows customizing your blog profile to get a unique look on Tumblr.

tips to get started with Tumblr marketing strategy

So, it is now clear that, as a marketer, you have massive chances to grow your business on Tumblr. Already a large number of online marketers use this to increase brand identity, brand awareness, and persuade users to buy products.

However, similar to other social media platforms, Tumblr also requires strategic movement to succeed. Here are some Tumblr marketing strategies to start your marketing activities effectively on this popular social media platform.

  • First is first, if you are new to this platform, get familiar with using it before step forward
  • Get a catchy Tumblr name to which will remind followers about you
  • Understand your niche precisely and make up your mind to think about the perspective of that niche. it will help you to create great Tumblr content on your niche
  • Once you have selected your niche, then you should intend to target your audience on Tumblr
  • You can set up your marketing goals in this stage, realize what you need, brand awareness, prospect, social engagement on your website? then implement the right marketing strategy to make it work for you
  • Post interesting content and don’t forget to use tags on that
  • Tumblr is available in paid marketing, so, you can sponsor whether your entire blog or single post to get explosive engagement to that
  • Build a good relationship with your followers by offering discount, buy one get one, etc
  • Don’t be so straight while promoting your brand or product, people hate to see direct promotion on social media platforms. rather they would engage more if you present it in a funny and interactive way
  • Increase your followers anyway

WeChat

Hands down WeChat is the most popular Chinese messaging and social media platform. In a word to describe the usage of WeChat in China, it is an app for everything like communicating with people, booking taxis, paying bills, spending leisure time scrawling on the newsfeed, and so on.

What’s unique is that it has a digital payment service which means users who have a bank account can use this app to pay bills and perform other transaction processes.

The app was initially launched in 2011 and developed by Tencent. It has developed as a messaging application like other social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp but its massive use in China drives it to become an all one platform with huge features and offerings.

Being the number one social media platform in the most populated country China, it is so competitive and difficult at present to succeed as a WeChat marketer. Besides, it has a large number of users in Hongkong and even in the US. There is ‘WeChat business’ for B2B and B2C businesses to acquire a large range of influence and profits with less input and a lower threshold.

Business can create a distinguished business presence through the ‘Mini program’ feature that allows creating mini apps to organize business activities properly on this platform.

Currently, it has more than 1 billion monthly active users all over the world. If you want to grow your business in WeChat, here are some quick WeChat marketing tips to practice as a fresher on this platform.

  • Define your target audience
  • WeChat offers three different types of official accounts such as service, subscription, mini program. before starting, consider what are they offer and which type of account you need for your purpose
  • Build up your WeChat content strategy, without quality content WeChat would be nothing but a waste of time for you
  • Follow WeChat trends regularly
  • Take WeChat promotion and advertising into account to get a quick draw on your things
  • Don’t forget to use WeChat marketing tools to get desired marketing success
  • Share your personal QR code everywhere online and offline

Viber

Viber is a VoIP (voice over IP) and instant messaging application developed by the Japanese multinational company Rakuten. It is a similar software like WhatsApp, Imo where users have to register with their cellular number. Also, users can share media files like images and videos.

It has over 1 billion active users all over the world who are using this as their daily messaging tool with friends and families. Besides, Viber has great potential for business and marketers. it is considered a great tool for business marketing because

  • Viber messages have a 90% open rate within three minutes
  • Users spend an average of 30 minutes daily on Viber
  • It has product ad option which is a great way to get sales and leads

There is an increasing number of marketers who focus on Viber to integrate into their marketing strategy. Because of its better advertising and business messaging solution, it makes it easy to engage lots of audiences on a single platform.

If you are also interested in using it for your business marketing purpose, you should focus on the following aspects.

  • Build your own business community, you can connect up to 1 billion members in your community
  • Communicate with your community members
  • Sticker ticker! It is a unique Viber marketing strategy that allows users to create and share their own designed stickers on Viber. as a brand, you can design your own branded sticker, when anyone downloads your sticker, they will automatically be subscribed to your public chat, and you are added to their contact list
  • Use public chat to showcase your brand
  • You can use marketing tools to automate welcome messages to new subscribers
  • For international audience, use 1 to 1 marketing
  • And finally, there is paid advertising to spread your word faster way

Line

Line is another VoIP as well as an instant messaging application like Viber and WhatsApp. But it includes some unique features that make the application chosen by everyone who is in need of similar facilities.

As a social media Line provides various services along with messaging. It has Line pay which is a digital wallet service that allows users to receive and send money from other users in their list. Also, it has line taxi, line wow, news streams as line today, video on demand as LINE TV, and digital comic distribution as LINE Manga and LINE Webtoon, line shopping. all of them are included as internal service comes with the line app.

The app was launched in 2011 and reached 100 million users within eighteen months and 200 million users only six months later. And just 2 years later after the launch, it has become the largest social network in Japan.

Although, most of the line users are based in Japan while a few portions of them are from the US and other Asian countries.

Despite this, Line is a remarkable platform to go with your marketing strategies. no matter wherever you are, you can see your target audience has active status in line. So, as a marketer, you must want it to use in your marketing funnel and own the advantages right?

To use Line for your marketing purpose, don’t forget to create an ‘Official account’ as it comes specifically for the business holders with tons of exciting features. Engage your target audiences, show them your business offerings, share engaging content in your timeline feed and be active to get success.

QQ

Another Chinese instant messaging application developed by Tencent. Although it is not so popular in the Facebook, Instagram era, you get surprised to know that QQ launched 22 years ago in 1999.

Whatever, it is now one of the top 20 social media platforms with more than one billion monthly active users worldwide. It is considered that everyone used to have a QQ account in China.

Unlike WeChat that is mostly used for formal and business purposes, QQ is a casual and entertaining platform for Chinese people.

When everyone is thinking about WeChat and Weibo to grow their online business presence, they are actually missing the hidden potentiality of QQ.

With more than 50% of the young user’s community, marketers can use this platform to reach any business goals, increasing brand awareness, and so on.

However, if your business isn’t targeting the Chinese consumer base, then you can skip this. it will be better to go through other social media platforms to integrate marketing strategies for your business.

Qzone

Qzone is a social networking website based in China that was created by Tencent in 2005. Q Zone is a personal blog for QQ users. It can be set as a public page or a private friends-only page. Users can upload diaries, write blogs, listen to music, watch videos, and share photos on Qzone.

Qzone occupies a large number of daily activities which makes it one of the most used social media platforms right now.

Qzone includes a wide variety of features such as certified space which is a great option for brands to grow their business profile in Qzone. Besides, it has ‘own space decoration’ that allows users to use background music in their own space, Qzone album, Qzone application center, and so on.

For marketers, it is not so profitable to spend money for marketing and advertising in Qzone. It is because most of the Qzone users are adults. so they aren’t likely to pay for buying products and services.

Another reason is, most of the Chinese who prefer online shopping are more likely to use Weibo and WeChat.

However, as a marketer, you can grow organically in Qzone and can make a little profit if you put effort on a regular basis.

Lets recap

The above discussion will educate you about the top 20 dominating social media platforms right now. It is highly important for marketers to choose the right platform to expand online business activity and connect with more and more people.

Because of the massive use of social media platforms, it has become a wide opportunity for marketers. if you are a business but don’t have activities on social media platforms, then you are living under rock in this modern digital world.

Therefore, set up your goals, plan for successful marketing strategies based on the platform you choose, and start giving effort into them. success is not so far if you are doing it the right way.

 

Leave a Comment