Best Social Media for Small Businesses (in 2021)

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Do you want to know the best social media platforms for small businesses to help boost engagement, drive more referral traffic, and increase revenue?

Except for your website, social media can be one of the best marketing tools for your business. It’s an excellent way to connect with existing customers, generate new leads and build brand awareness.

The shift in attitude towards social media has made business owners realize it’s a marketing channel they can’t afford not to utilize. In the early days, many judged social media to be only for the young, but research shows that 35-54-year-olds now use social media just as much as their younger counterparts.

But with the growing number of social media platforms on the market, which one should you choose?

Today, I’m going to answer that exact question. I’m going to share my top 5 social media platforms for small businesses. But first, let’s get clear on why social media marketing is such a valuable tool.

Why Use Social Media for Your Business?

When building a business, there are many reasons why you should use social media, and here are a few of them:

    Helps Build Brand Awareness: Being active on social media can help you promote your brand. After enough exposure, people will remember your brand’s name and may decide to check out your products and services.
    Engage With Customers and Prospects: Social media opens the lines of communications between you, your customer base, and prospects. Best of all, it gives you the ability to nurture your existing relationships and build new ones.
    Grow Your Email List: With the extra traffic you get to your website from social media networks, you’ll have more opportunities to turn traffic into leads and grow your email list.
    Boost Your SEO: When posting your blog posts or product pages on social media, you will increase the referral traffic to your website. And more traffic and pageviews will ultimately improve your rankings in search engines.

 

Top 5 Social Media for Small Businesses

Now that you know why using social media is an excellent marketing strategy, let’s look at the 5 best social media networks for small businesses and why they are.

1. Facebook

With over 2.74 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the best social media platforms available for small businesses.

You can use Facebook to find your target audience to get new customers, build an email list, and drive more organic traffic to your website.

It’s also an excellent place to interact with your customers once you’ve caught their attention and build a lasting relationship. For instance, you can create private Facebook groups where paying customers can interact with your brand and ask questions.

And if you have the budget and want to get more out of Facebook, you can explore Facebook ads.

2. Instagram

Instagram became a success almost overnight. In fact, within two months of its launch in 2010, Instagram had over a million users. As amazing as that was, Instagram has grown to over 1 billion active users, making it a social media platform any business should tap into.

From the start, Instagram was all about sharing photos, which is still its core use. But a while back, it also expanded to videos and the ability to create “stories.” The stories feature is beneficial for businesses since it allows you to include links to product pages and other website content.

With this feature, Instagram has become an excellent way for brands to showcase their products and company values. The fact that 56% of users suffer from FOMO or “fear of missing out” makes Instagram excellent to market products that people want to buy to keep up with the latest trends.

More specifically, Instagram is excellent at targeting younger audiences shopping from mobile. And the platform recently created a “checkout” feature so users can purchase what they like directly from their Instagram account.

3. Twitter

Twitter’s popularity peaked in 2007 using its brilliant marketing strategy of limited characters to give everyone a voice but limit the “noise.” Twitter is used throughout all industries to build brand awareness, express values, and share links to content.

When using Twitter for business, your success comes down to consistency. You need to post valuable content and engage with your audience daily, preferably 5-6 Tweets per day.

Twitter is all about building relationships. So, to be successful on Twitter, you need to dedicate time and effort to posting frequent Tweets, responding to comments, and retweeting other users’ content.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a networking tool exclusively for professionals. It has revolutionized the way people seek, find, and get hired for jobs. It’s also a good resource for businesses to share content, advertise their products and services, and list job openings.

LinkedIn is best for professional networking and to find new business partners.

However, people don’t typically use LinkedIn for entertainment or to find products to shop online. Instead, they are more likely to visit LinkedIn to learn more about their industry, look for new career opportunities, and see what their professional network is up to.

But LinkedIn can still be an excellent platform for finding new B2B customers and putting your brand in front of industry-leading professionals.

5. YouTube

Youtube is the number one platform for posting video content. It has over 2 billion monthly users and is a place where people go for entertainment and learn new things. That’s why it is such an incredibly powerful marketing tool for any business.

With YouTube, you can create video tutorials, give reviews, showcase products, connect with your audience, and share links to your website. There’s enormous potential to get the word out about your business.

It will take a little bit of time upfront to grow your YouTube channel and learn how to shoot and edit videos.

Just remember to optimize your YouTube titles and descriptions to help get more visibility and grow your subscribers. And before you know it, you’ll be well on your way to getting more leads, referral traffic, and customers for your business.

And that’s it.

Wrapping Up

When it comes to the best social media platforms for small businesses, there’s no magic bullet. Consider what platform is the most relevant for your business and where your target audience is, and go from there.

Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.

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