When running an online business, one of the easiest ways to bring traffic to your website is by using social media platforms. If this is a traffic avenue you are considering, you might be wondering, “which social channel should I use to market my business? Is it Facebook, Instagram or both?
The truth is for you to launch and run a successful business, you need to maximize your social media marketing by leveraging the power of these two channels. Facebook and Instagram are currently among the most popular platforms with combined monthly traffic of close to 3 billion users. Following its big-money acquisition by Facebook in 2012, Instagram has been growing by leaps and bounds and is now a huge force to reckon with in the world of business marketing.
In this post, we take a look at how you can use both Facebook and Instagram to grow your online business by focusing on the strengths of each. But before we go ahead and dive in, I think it’s important to point out that you need to have your business fully set up from a legal point of view before you can even consider what marketing strategies to use for your business. If for example your business is ready to become an LLC, each State has different laws and processes that you have to go through in order to set one up. If you have a Californian business check out the following link you can find lots of helpful advice about forming an LLC in California so you can get your business off the ground.
What Does Facebook Offer in Business Marketing?
Wider Reach
Facebook boasts the biggest reach among all social media channels with more than 2.2 billion monthly users on average. This means if your main aim is to reach as many users as possible, this is your most recommended channel. But buyers beware of the Facebook algorithm. Algorithms are Facebook’s way of sorting users and showing them the kinds of content they think users want to see based off the kinds of content they currently engage with. Which means that you may have 5,000 likes on your Facebook page but may only reach a small portion of them because of your relevancy to those accounts. But how do you tackle this? We’re glad you asked. The most obvious way is to pay to promote your posts, however, not everybody has the budget. An organic method is to engage with the people who do like your page and comment and share your content, making sure you answer questions and respond to messages. This method takes time and a bunch of patience, so try to level your expectations from the get-go.
Diverse Demographics
Due to the fact that Facebook has been in existence for longer than most of its counterparts, it attracts an older demographic that have probably been using it from its infancy days. Other than that, even younger generations especially those in the 18-29 years age group seem to love it as well. Generally, Facebook is where you will find the most diverse demographic when you compare it with all other social channels. So, if your business is meant for all age groups, this is an excellent platform you can add to your marketing arsenal.
Paid Advertising
Among the best performing ads today are those by Facebook, probably only rivaled by Google Ads. This explains why more and more businesses are investing thousands of dollars in ad spend on this channel and getting loads of business leads and customers in return. Facebook ads also boast incredible click-through rates, especially if you observe the best practices and target the right demographics.
What does Instagram Offer in Business Marketing?
Reach
While Instagram doesn’t have a bigger reach than Facebook, the close to 1 billion monthly users are probably more than you need to get your business in front of the customers. All you need is to devise an effective Instagram marketing strategy to increase the visibility of your business and get people to know your brand. Similar to Facebook, Instagram also has an algorithm. To maximise your reach, ensure you engage with your followers when they comment on posts.
High Engagement
This is without a doubt the biggest benefit you will gain when you decide to use Instagram for your business marketing. Users of this platform share millions of pictures and short videos daily which then get billions of likes in return. While the recent changes implemented by the platform to curtail the power of influencers have had a significant negative impact on the engagement levels, Instagram still boasts the highest engagement levels today.
Drive Traffic
While it can be harder to drive traffic to your website using Instagram due to the general setup of user-profiles, visitors coming from this platform tend to spend a lot more time on your site compared to traffic sent from Facebook and Twitter. This could mean lower bounce back rate and higher possibility of these visitors converting into buying customers.
Demographic
Every time you’re choosing a social media platform to market your brand, the first thing you need to understand is your target market. As we had mentioned earlier, Facebook works better when you are targeting older age groups, although younger generations also work fine there. When it comes to Instagram, the biggest demographic you will find here are younger women. This means the platform works very well for brands whose target market are the young women including fashion, weight loss, and relationships among others.
However, that doesn’t mean other businesses targeting men and the older populations cannot benefit from Instagram marketing. The number of users on any of these social platforms is so big that you cannot exhaust it when promoting a business in any industry.
Social media marketing is a numbers game. The higher the number of target users on a platform, the higher your chances of succeeding there.
How do you approach your business marketing on Facebook and Instagram? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below!
* This article was originally published here
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