Top 7 in terms of users and their propensity to get you seen by as many clients as possible:
1. Facebook
Facebook has the most active users of any social media platform, meaning that using Facebook to market your product or business will give you the potential to get in front of as many clients as possible.
2. Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger is an app that comes along with Facebook, and is the “direct message” portion of Facebook. You can utilize Facebook Messenger by interacting directly with potential clients, which will create a personalized feel for them and spur loyalty to your brand down the road. Further, if you do not have time to manage your company’s Facebook account personally, you can set up an automated message from your company to anyone that follows or friends you!
3. Instagram
Instagram has the second-most active users of any social media website. Instagram is owned by Facebook, so they have similar access to algorithms that get your content in front of new users.
Instagram also benefits from an almost entirely photographic content platform in which you are encouraged to share visual content with your customers. Visual content can be great to grab users’ attention, share pertinent information like data or video content, and help your users get to know your brand on a personal level. Furthermore, Instagram is a great place to implement user-generated content as a part of your marketing scheme. That is, if you encourage users to use hashtags that are easily searchable by your company while posting pictures of your product. You can then post these users’ photos on your page so that when future potential customers visit your page, they see candid reactions of everyday people using your product.
4. Snapchat
Snapchat has a ton of active users. Snapchats themselves are only momentary, but stories stay up for 24 hours, and there are opportunities for paid advertising within snapchat’s story feature. This is how companies like BuzzFeed and ScienceNow interact with a lot of their fanbase(s).
5. YouTube
YouTube is an entirely visual platform, with the added benefit of unlimited* amount of time that your videos can be. You can also optimize your page or videos in the same way that you would optimize your website for Google’s search engine because Youtube is owned by Google. Therefore, they have the same search engine algorithms for showing content to users. YouTube can also use the information that Google has regarding users’ search history to show targeted ads to people that would be interested in your product.
*There is a limit of 10 hours for videos, but there is no reason to post a video longer than that for business purposes.
6. Twitter
Twitter is a great place to interact with new potential customers as a result of the snowball effect that retweets can have on your visibility. You can also get content in front of people with the use of hashtags. Twitter utilizes a mostly textual platform, with a maximum of 240 characters per Tweet. As a result, this is a great place to share concise and useful information with people that do not want to spend a great deal of time getting to know about your company. Furthermore, it is very easy to interact with other users on Twitter, so it is a great way to create a brand for your company, and give a personal feel to an otherwise faceless company. Lastly, Twitter also supports the sharing of pictures and videos, allowing you to post similar content to what would be shared on Instagram or YouTube.
7. LinkedIn
Expected that you will market your brand on here, and the marketing is welcome and supported. If your brand is deemed reputable on LinkedIn, that means it has some significant professional value, rather than gaining followers and likes for snarky quips at users that disagree with the views of your company
Obviously, which website is best for each individual company is specific to the brand, content, and point of the company itself. For example, B2B companies might be better suited for LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook than B2C companies who may be better off on the other websites. B2B companies can benefit from LinkedIn significantly more than B2C companies because LinkedIn supplies a platform within which companies can communicate each other, and it is easy to see the network that plays out within each company, as just about everyone has listed which company they work for and their job title. Therefore, it can also aid your company in outbound marketing strategies such as targeted outbound marketing/cold calling. The other companies have a bit of a broader net to cast, as they are trying to drive sales up by inviting as many customers as possible to engage with their company/product. Therefore, they are better off relying on the network ability of websites like Twitter and Instagram.