What is the best social media network to market your business?
That largely depends on your demographic.
We’ve found that business-to-business companies (B2B) are better off marketing on LinkedIn. But it still depends on the industry. Tech companies seem to market well on LinkedIn, while manufacturing companies do better on Twitter. Companies with a higher male focus tend to market better on LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook tends to market better for female-weighted industries.
Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies tend to market better on Facebook and Twitter. Those who market towards males tend to do better on Twitter, while those who market towards females do better on Facebook.
Pinterest works really well for female oriented products like clothing and jewelry. It also does really well for food manufacturers in the form of recipe ideas.
Youth-oriented products and services, particularly in the 16-24 age range, are best marketed on Facebook, but also with Instagram. You can’t really sell anything through Instagram, nor is it a good way to generate traffic, but it’s a very powerful branding channel for that age group.
Companies that want to reach the older age groups, in the 55+ range, do better marketing through Facebook.
Twitter is actually great as a branding tool, but not so much for driving traffic. It’s worth it to set up a Twitter account for your business, create an attractive avatar, and just tweet photos of your products and staff.
Instagram is great for branding as well, but better for younger demographics.
What about Google+? Google+ still seems to be searching for its niche. It tends to attract more males by a wide margin, and it’s age group is more in the middle (34 to 55). It’s popular with tech people. But Google+ is going to become highly influential over the next few years as Google gradually increases social media signals into its search engine algorithm. It’s worth it to you use Google+ regularly, just to build up a following.
If you still can’t seem to make up your mind on which social media network to invest your marketing efforts into, we would actually recommend Google+. Why? As we noted above, it’s going to become incredibly influential over the next few years. By contrast, Facebook has become increasingly expensive to market through due to the way it prevents you from reaching your base of followers.