Social networks have firmly entered the culture and have become an integral part of the daily routine of every modern person who uses a smartphone, tablet, or computer and necessarily several times a day visits the pages of social networks, promoting their profile, evaluating friends, learning interesting information, performing other activities. Major analytics platforms We Are Social and Hootsuite estimate online audience growth of one million new users daily or 11 newcomers per second.
Most of the fresh users come from India and China, two of the world’s largest nations that continue to grow technologically and demographically, increasing their populations and expanding their economic potential. Other developing countries also actively participate in the process of Internet audience growth and popularization of social networks.
The average Internet user spends about six hours online, regularly using the global network to visit favorite or multiple social networks. Millennials go to bed and wake up next to their favorite smartphone to the beeps of friends’ messages, updates, fresh posts, and watching movies at the best movie theaters. The older generation – moms, dads, and grandparents – are also following millennial fashion.
Today, social media channels are no longer just a way to communicate. On the platforms, users maintain pages to express their positions. They actively comment on publications and express their opinions on everything that is happening in the world.
Social networks are not only a place for people to communicate but also a platform for working with potential customers, responding quickly, and holding promotions to attract the target audience.
When comparing social networks with each other, it makes sense to consider only active users, not the number of accounts created. In most social networks, the process of creating additional accounts is as complicated as possible – there is a mandatory link to a phone number, email, and accounts in other social networks. Owners of accounts not accessed daily are asked to secure their data with additional bindings the next time they log in.
Statista publishes regular answers, counting the number of active social network users per month. There are 4.62 billion active social network users in total, which is 58.4% of the global population.
Facebook – 2.91 million
YouTube – 2.56 million
WhatsApp – 2 million
Instagram – 1,47 million
Weixin – 1.26 million
TikTok – 1 million
The list of popular social networks is topped by platforms for easily accessible user content: photos, videos, and things that don’t take a long time to read. So the TikTok logo can be seen more and more often at the top of all sorts of popularity ratings.
If you are promoting your brand on a particular social network, the content must be strictly adapted to the requirements of the audience. Do not try to promote textual content on Twitter or Instagram: the users of these platforms are used to receiving visual material with only a small text component. Few people go into long comments under the posts; the main emphasis should be placed on visuals and brevity.
Promotion on Facebook allows for variations in content. The platform is sharpened for the content of a different kind: short messages, photos with captions, and long reads on specific topics. There are many communities and opportunities to discuss anything with like-minded people.
In addition to the already old classics of social networking and promotion mechanisms, other social networks are gaining popularity, such as Reddit, a social news site where registered users can post links to a variety of news or any other information they like. With the help of a voting system, Reddit displays the most popular news on the website’s home page.
But the assortment doesn’t end there, either. The only fans logo flashes before our eyes more and more often, and the story of the platform’s meteoric success with adult content is known to everyone – OnlyFans is one of the few that owes its rise to the pandemic.
How to promote business on social networks
Maintaining business accounts in social networks and a separate budget for SMM is becoming the norm for large companies. The most popular social networks have additional functionality for registration and management of business accounts and also offer integrated systems for analyzing attendance, activity, and effectiveness of promotions.
If you have decided to promote your business or product on social networks, remember the basic principles:
- Better a good promotion in one social network than a bad promotion in several;
- The social network selected for promotion must match the specifics of the brand: cosmetics and perfumes are better presented through social networks of visual content;
- Content should correspond to both the social network and the brand;
- For some social networks, it’s critically important to interact with your audience, and this is an additional cost to develop promotions and contests, which must be taken into account when making an estimate;
- Promotion in some social networks has a beneficial effect on promotion in search engines, especially if the social network platform and search engine belong to the same company.
