To be honest with you: I wasn’t very sure about Social Media in the beginning. I kept fighting it because, what social was hardly able to show to me is, that it has a business impact in direct sales (which is not true by the way for some business models). So I kind of neglected any activities on these platforms to be worth all the effort that you usually have to put in it. Years ago I hardly saw performance rising for websites when they used or started to use social media in general. I was a purely performance-driven SEO guy who cared a lot about his numbers, visits, clicks, ROI, and conversions but not very much else.
What helped me understand Social Media better, was a change in my perspective on performance, visibility and some other things. There are two great advantages of Social Media: targeting and personalization!
Social Media Trends not to ignore in 2019
Let’s have a look at Social Media usage before we dig deeper into strategies, targeting, and personalization. According to ComScore, Facebook is still the most important platform and it probably will be for many years. So all that hype about other platforms is kind of ridiculous as long as you keep in mind your target audience.
KEY STAT: With 1.75 billion monthly users worldwide this year, Facebook still leads the global social media market. Sister company Instagram is No. 2 with 786.8 million. Find the original study here.
My recommendation would be to use the following Social Media Platforms at all cost:
- Youtube
- Redit
In some cases it might be good to have a look at the following additional platforms. That depends on the topic of your own content.
- TikTok (video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos)
- Caffeine (social broadcasting platform for gaming, entertainment, and the creative arts)
- Lasso (short video sharing platform by Facebook)
- Houseparty (group video chat platform)
- Steemit (blockchain-based blogging and social website)
- Twitch (online service for watching and streaming digital video broadcasts)
What platforms to use in 2019
You might be as overwhelmed as I am, kind of, of all these platforms. These will for sure not be the only ones that are available by the end of this year. Before giving you the answers to some important questions, I want to make sure that it should not be your first priority to be on each and every platform at once. It simply does not make sense and especially as a freelancer, single person, entrepreneur, blogger you will not have enough time for it.
Don’t worry – you will not have to write or produce content for each and every platform to gain enough traction for your business. Just make sure to pick the most important ones including Linkedin if you are in B2B business. Despite that, think about where your target audience might be.
I strongly recommend you use at least Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and if you’d like to or feel comfortable with, Youtube. Youtube is still the most used platform of all with a massive amount of users and it’s perfect integration in Google search.
Check your target audience first
Here you can find and overview of social media demographics and insights provided by different sources. This data is specifically for the United States but except for some country specific deviations (like YouTube outranking Facebook in India), there should not be that much of a difference. I will for sure take a closer look into that in a later study.
The Social Media Demographics info graphic
If you want to use this infographic on your site, please feel free to use the code below! (Remember this data us specifically for the United States – as I was able to get the most information from all platforms for this country).
Any questions or comments?
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