At this era, it is essential for any business to have an online presence. Being online as a brand usually means having an account on one or more social media sites. However, not all social media sites are immediately suitable for all business. As a business, we need to determine which social media platforms best suit our products, target markets and services.
Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly active users. Facebook is pretty business friendly, in that it has an option for entrepreneur to set up a business centric account. As a business account, entrepreneur can post ads, and boost the posts. Facebook has an option called facebook ads which allows businesses to run paid ads, with costs depending on the parameters they set.
Entrepreneur are allowed to determine which geographical areas, age group and market target, as well as how long the ads to run. Ads can also take several forms- from image, video, carousel, collection and instant experience ads. Instant experience and collection ads are unique to Facebook, whereby the ad will become full screen on mobile when interacted with.
Instagram has about 1 Billion active monthly users worldwide and 11.5 million users in Malaysia alone. It’s a largely image based platform, whereby users post images of their daily lives, meals or anything else and those following them can interact with these images. In addition to images, Instagram also allows users to post short videos of less than 1 minute. Videos longer than a minute will go into another section called IGTV.
For businesses, Instagram provides an option for entrepreneur to create an IG business account. This account has many features not found in a regular user’s profile. Apart from that, entrepreneur can also create ads for both the Instagram feed and Instagram stories. As a business, the stories which are 15 to 30 second pictures or videos will appear if a follower interacts with the entrepreneur brand a lot.
Tiktok
TikTok attracts about 1 billion active users monthly. TikTok in Malaysia has 4 million users, the majority of whom are under 25. TikTok is a platform whereby users post short videos and other users will be able to like and comment on them. For businesses, TikTok offers a business account where entrepreneur can post different types of ads.
A business account also lets entrepreneur monitor content and follower metrics so they can make better marketing decisions. Plus, TikTok business lets entrepreneur to set up as a business profile, so followers and other users can recognize their brand. There are many types of TikTok ads that will benefit entrepreneur such as in-feed ads, top view, brand effects and brand hashtags challenges.
Twitter is a social media platform where users communicate via short text posts. It attracts 336 million active users per month and about 5 million users in Malaysia. Another way for businesses to be recognized on Twitter is through Twitter ads, These types of ads will show up as sponsored posts in the timelines of users that are part of entrepreneur predetermined target audience.
Advertising and marketing channel on Twitter is sponsored trends. This allows entrepreneur to create a hashtag, which Twitter places at the top of your target audience’s trending hashtags list. Twitter marketing strategy depends a lot on hashtags, which are terms tagged with the # symbol. Therefore if entrepreneur would like their brand to be noticed by more Twitter users, using trending hashtags is a way to do it.
YouTube
Youtube is a place where to watch funny and entertaining videos. Youtube is home to many influencers in Malaysia, who benefit frommarketing and monetizing their content through ads. There are many ways to market your brand on Youtube, beyond just turning it into a video hosting site for other social media platforms.
YouTube functions as a social media platform because users need sign in with their Google account. One of marketing strategy is to ensure that the YouTube profile is properly filled out with information about the products, or links to other sites with complete information. Another marketing strategy is to optimize SEO terms related to the business and place them in the video title so that it will show up to those searching for the topic.
