Harrisons Blog

Choosing Best Social Media Platform for Advertising to Grow Your Business

Written by Harrison Baron | Jul 2, 2021 4:00:00 AM

Choosing Best Social Media Platform for Advertising to grow business

When it comes to business, there is a classical saying, "You can’t make money without spending money first." Of course, without marketing, it's like "business resides at home." Such business doesn't grab potential customers and hence, won't be able to make the profit.

Marketing, obviously, fetches to the customers about your brand. There used to be a time when business owners prefer marketing on television, hoarding board, pamphlets, etc. However, with the emerging technologies and increasing internet reach, the marketing strategies have changed its originality and path.

About 85% of total internet users are active on social sites. So, how about marketing the business on these social media platforms? But with dozens of social sites, it's finicky in choosing the best social media platform for advertising. Nevertheless, advertising depends on business type and strategies.

Alt Tag: Choosing the best social media platform for advertising

Why should you prefer social media platform for advertising?

People spend hours navigating on social media sites. Without any doubt, they perform searches according to their interests. The merit of it is; business owners can target them for marketing purposes. Some of the direct benefits of social media advertising are:

  • Provides accurate analytics on marketing
  • Choosing the audience according to demographics
  • Growing fanbase and engagement
  • Brand awareness becomes easier.
  • Higher ROI with smaller budget
  • A/B testings with ads to enhance the performance of the ads
  • Full Control over the ads
  • And so on.

With dozens of benefits, you have made the right choice in performing marketing using social media platforms. But the question is, on which social media site should you advertise? Or Should you invest in all the major social sites? Which social media brings higher ROI with smaller budget?

How to choose the best social media platform for advertising?

Before deciding the best social media platform for advertising, let's have a quick overview of social sites.

People are using social sites to make the decision to purchase a product. B2C marketers acquire customers from social sites. Social media platforms are the place for brand reputation management. Moreover, it's a place for increasing customer engagement and fanbase and a great way for network marketing as well.

On today's date, people like to buy apparel through window shopping on the internet. Also, people are highly influenced by social media sites.

Here are some criteria for choosing social sites for advertising:

  • Understand where your audience resides
  • Choosing the social media platform depends upon the marketing strategies.
  • Track out the social share of your products
  • Intention for advertising
  • Usage of online brand reputation management Softwares to have knowledge of higher engagement rate
  • Variety of Ads supported on a social media platform

Top 7 Social media Platforms for advertising

More or less, every social media platform brings customers to your business. The only matters are long term involvement for management of brand reputation, brand awareness, reaching out to more customers, and customer engagements. Every social media platform is best; the only difference occurs, is due to marketing strategies.

Nearly every social media platforms provide the same business goals and marketing objectives. But the process of presenting the goals are different.

  1. Facebook

As we all know, Facebook is still #1 social media site on the internet. But is it worth advertising on Facebook? Well, It depends upon the business you own. Nearly Facebook can provide all the advertising facilities. However, it can't fulfill all the features that are provided by other social media platforms. Facebook pages are a great way of engaging followers towards the business. Furthermore, these pages help in building trustability and brand reputation. Before moving on to the reasons for choosing Facebook for advertising, let's have a quick view of its statistics:

Alt tag: Facebook for advertising

Facebook Statistics

  • 1.73 billion daily active users
  • 2.6 billion monthly active users
  • $17 billion revenue from advertising
  • Average cost per click for a Facebook ad is $1.72
  • Average time spent on Facebook: 58 min.
  • 86% of US marketers use Facebook for advertising

Advertising on Facebook suits to most of the business. Since the platform has a wide range of ads variety, so, Facebook stands at #1 position for most marketers.

Business Goal for advertising

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversion
  • Remarketing

Supported ads

  • Photo ads
  • Video Ads
  • Stories Ads
  • Carousel Ads
  • Slideshow ads
  • collection Ads
  • Instant Experience Ads
  • Messenger Ads
  • Lead Generation Ads

Why should you advertise on Facebook?

With billions of active users, it's easier to target the interested audience on the platform. Since the profile data is managed by Facebook itself, it provides accurate analytics on ads performance. Facebook is best for Remarketing, increasing fanbase, and customer engagements. A/B testings, actual metrics, control over ads, choosing the audience, etc. made the Facebook as the best social media platform for advertising. The support of a variety of ads format made it suitable for most of the marketing strategies.

Facebook pages provide trustability to the business. And also, it makes improves the brand reputation. Advertising on Facebook helps to keep the customers engaged on the pages. Furthermore, the Facebook page can be helpful for informing your audiences about the latest product, offers, news, etc.

Pros of advertising on Facebook

  • Global Reach
  • Selection of audience according to demographics
  • Accurate analytics & metrics
  • Brand Reputation Management

Cons of advertising on Facebook

  • Extremely high competition
  • Low click-through rate & conversion rate
  • Difficult to capture the attention
  1. Twitter

Social media, Twitter, is famous because it has fewer spam user accounts and a short message called tweets. Followers on twitter improve brand reputation. An increasing follower on twitter builds trust among the customers. Also, it helps to keep your customers informed about your latest products, offers, discounts or any company news. You may use the twitter account to build trust among your customers.

Twitter Statistics

  • 335 million Monthly Active Users
  • 145 million daily active users
  • Average time spent on Twitter: 3.39 min
  • 67% of B2B marketers use Twitter as a digital marketing tool

Supported ads and objectives

  • Website Clicks: Promote tweets to encourage people to visit the website
  • Tweet engagement: Promote tweet with the goal of starting the conversation
  • Followers: To gain followers
  • Awareness: Promote tweets to a broad audience
  • App installs: Promote tweets to install the app
  • Promoted accounts
  • Promoted Trends

Why should you advertise on Twitter?

B2B marketers use Twitter for brand awareness using promoted trends. Also, to increase engagements and build up the brand reputation, twitter plays a crucial role. Like Facebook ads, Twitter allows you to reach an accurate audience. Since the user's accounts data are managed by twitter, ads analytics are accurate. The audiences can be targeted based on location, age, gender, device, interest, etc. So, it's easy to showcase your brand to your targeted audience. In case, if you want to generate website traffic or leads, twitter is best for marketing purposes using promoted trends ads.

  1. Youtube

Video streaming site, Youtube, features advertising on its platform. People love to watch tips, tricks, learning, how-to videos, product reviews, etc. If your business provides such type of service or product, then Youtube can be your best advertising social media platform. To run and manage the ad on Youtube, you will need Google Ads account. Not only video ads, but image ads are also available, which appear at the sidebar and at the bottom of the video.

Alt tag: youtube for advertising

Youtube Statistics

  • 2 billion monthly active users
  • 62% of business use Youtube to post video content
  • 90% of people say they new products or brand on youtube

Business Goals

  • Website Traffic
  • Collect leads
  • Brand awareness
  • Brand consideration

Ads Supported

  • Trueview Ads
  • Non-Skippable Youtube Ads
  • Bumper Ads

Why should you use Youtube for advertising?

If you have a video to showcase your product, then, Youtube can be the best place to market your product. Youtube grabs the attention of the audience and has a remarkable impact on customer purchases. It's easier to tracks the ad metrics. Google shows every detail about the performance of the video, such as how many parts of the video are watched; through this, its a great chance to improve the performance of the ads. The Remarketing feature helps you to generate more leads and sales. With advertising on youtube, ROI is higher than any traditional ads on television.

  1. Quora

Quora, the best site for questioning and answering portal on the internet. It has a wide variety of categories for answering and questioning. Categories and topics help the advertisers to narrow down their audience so that advertisers can get to the interested customers. The placement of ads just after the question is most effective which increases conversions and leads in the business.

Statistics of Quora

  • 300 million monthly active users
  • B2B companies leverage Quora Ads
  • Adults spent more time on Quora than on LinkedIn
  • 4x more conversions in businesses
  • User spend an average of 4 minutes on Quora
  • 27% of marketers plan to invest more on Quora Ads

Business Goals

  • Conversions
  • App installs
  • Traffic
  • Awareness

Audience targeting based on topics, questions, keywords and interest makes Quora unique from other advertising platforms.

Ads Supported

  • Image Ad
  • Text Ad
  • Promote an Answer

Why should you advertise on Quora?

Quora is a knowledge-sharing website. Every user on this site has their interested topics, questions, and answers. Thus, targeting such an audience that resembles your business product or service is more comfortable. Moreover, Promoting a solution is an excellent way for brand awareness and generating leads. It is researched that Quora provides 4x conversions. By selecting the proper question as targeting, Quora can increase the website traffic in a massive way.

  1. LinkedIn

The users on LinkedIn, which is in millions in number, are professionals, decision-makers, and senior-level influencers. LinkedIn is excessively used for advertising by business-to-business (B2B) sector companies. This social site is a showcase of the portfolio of every professional.

LinkedIn Statistics

  • 660 million registered users
  • 80 million monthly active users
  • 30 million companies are listed on LinkedIn
  • 2nd most popular platform among B2B marketers
  • Reach of LinkedIn ads: 160 million users
  • 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to publish content
  • 65% of B2B companies got customer through LinkedIn

Marketing Objectives

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversions

Supported Ads

  • Sponsored Content
  • Sponsored InMail
  • Text Ads
  • Video Ads
  • Dynamic Ads
  • Carousel Ads
  • Display Ads

Why should you use LinkedIn for Advertising?

LinkedIn consists of an accurate database of professionals with their past work records, skills, position in the companies, location, and many more, which you can't find in any other social media platform. On this site, you can target your audience according to their job title, company name, location, interest, and so on. Targeting the audience with such demographics narrow down the audience, which helps to get to the potential customer.

LinkedIn features Sponsored InMail; thus a company can send a customized message to the desired audiences, which becomes more effective for fetching the customers. LinkedIn is the best social media platform for advertising for B2B marketers.

  1. Pinterest

An image sharing website and social media service, Pinterest, with over 300 million monthly active users, provide ideas for home & style inspiration, recipes, and more. More than 70% of Pinterest users are females. It is researched that 87% of pinners make a purchase because of Pinterest.

Pinterest Statistics

  • 322 million monthly active users
  • 1/3 of US user use Pinterest to follow brands & Companies
  • 28% of marketers worldwide use Pinterest for marketing

Business Goals (Marketing Objectives)

  • Increase Traffic to the website
  • Brand awareness
  • App installs
  • Traffic to specific product
  • Video impressions

Supported Ads

  • Promoted Pins
  • Promoted Carousels
  • Video Pins, App Pins, Buyable pins

Why Should you use Pinterest for advertising?

Image drive e-commerce sales. Pinterest is a visual social network (image sharing website), so, no doubt, it works perfectly for e-commerce stores. Pinterest features Buyable Pins, which is similar to window shopping. It will link to the product information which is kept on sale. The buyable pin increased the fashion brand by 73%. Pinterest is proven as the best social media platform for advertising to increase the sale of fashion wares, styles, recipes, etc. The pins (ads on Pinterest) are customizable as product pins, recipe pins, article pins, Movie pins, Place pins, and App pins, which help the advertiser to customize their ads.

  1. Instagram

Own by Facebook; thus, there is no doubt the Instagram ads are controlled through Facebook. Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social media platform. Instagram has a clean UI that it becomes difficult to distinguish between ads and feed images. Being the photo-sharing website, it has a huge scope to increase the e-commerce sales of business related to fashion wares, decorable things, etc. The tags used on Instagram made it feasible for ads other than the fashion ware categories.

Alt tag: using Instagram for marketing

Instagram Statistics

  • 1 billion monthly active users
  • 500 million daily users
  • Average time spent on Instagram: 53 minutes
  • 71% of US business uses Instagram
  • 50% of Instagram user follow at least one business
  • 80% of Instagram users decide whether to buy product or service with the help of Instagram

Ads Supported

  • Photo
  • Carousel
  • Collection
  • Video
  • Instagram Stories ads

Business Goal

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversion

Why should you use Instagram for advertising?

Instagram ads are less annoying to the targeted audience since they are well curated. This image-sharing website has full scope for enhancing e-commerce stores. Furthermore, Instagram can be integrated with the Shopify store, and hence advertisers can sell products instantly. Instagram provides higher ROI and conversions with less time-consuming in managing the ads.

To Sum Up

To some extent, every social media platform is best for advertising.

  • Facebook is best for remarketing
  • Twitter is best for building brand reputation
  • Youtube is best for video ads and engagement on videos ads
  • Quora is best for conversions through answer and question targeted audiences
  • LinkedIn is best for narrowing the audience
  • Pinterest drives e-commerce sales through window shopping on the internet
  • Instagram Provide less annoying ads

The social media platform should be chosen by observing the business goal of the company. Also, the advertiser must be aware of the supported ads on the platform. It depends upon the marketing strategy to get effective results from social media advertising. The major benefit of advertising on social media platforms is; the ads are shown to the interested people only.

In the marketing process, advertisers must be aware of using copywriting technics, optimized landing pages, call-to-action-buttons, optimized and clean images, catchy headlines, description, and so on. Without proper practice, you can't blame the social media platform.