The Best Social Media Platforms for Business: Your Ultimate Guide

Are you looking for the best social media platforms for business so you can work on your social strategy and see a larger ROI?

Social media can be one of your company’s most profitable marketing channels. It’s an excellent way to build brand awareness, connect with existing customers, and generate new leads to fill your funnel.

But with over 65 social media platforms in existence, which one will give you the most bang for your buck?

Today, we’re going to answer that exact question. We’re going to share the top 8 social media platforms for business. Then, we’re going to teach you how to use those platforms to help your company reach its growth goals.

First, though, let’s get clear on what social media marketing is and why it’s such a valuable tool.

Why Use Social Media for Business?

There are many reasons why you’d want to use social media for business. Here are a few of the top 5 advantages:

1) Build Brand Awareness: Being active on social media helps you stand out and keeps your name on peoples’ minds throughout the day. After enough exposure, you’re bound to get more interested people checking out your brand’s content.

2) Connect With Customers: It’s a rookie mistake to think that your business just needs to “close the sale.” Instead, social media opens the lines of communications between you and your customer base. This reduces your churn rate and leads to repeat customers in the future.

3) Boost Your SEO: By promoting your content on social media, you can get more likes, views, shares, and engagement with your content. Then, you’ll drive more traffic to your site which boosts pageviews. These are all positive signs to search engines like Google, and these factors help improve your SEO.

4) Grow Your Mailing List: Once people get to your website from your social media content, you’ll have more opportunities to turn traffic into leads. Over time, you can use this traffic to grow your email list and generate even more revenue from your email campaigns.

5) Drive More Revenue: Each of the advantages listed above leads to one thing: leading customers down your sales funnel and generating more profit for your business.

Now, you may be wondering, “With all those benefits, why aren’t more people successfully using social media for business? Why do so many brands seem to get it wrong?”

The problem most businesses face isn’t whether or not to use social media: that’s kind of a given these days.

The real question is which platform is best and how can that platform specifically encourage growth.

So, today, we’re going to focus on the top 8 best social media platforms for business, cover their advantages, disadvantages, and give our final verdict on whether or not they’re good for your business.

Then we’ll talk about how to use each platform to grow your company with OptinMonster. The platforms we’re looking at are:

Let’s get started.

Best Social Media Platforms for Business

Before we get started, let’s get clear on the goal of this post. It’s NOT to list off a few social media platforms. And it’s NOT to give your “the silver bullet” platform that will solve all your troubles.

Instead, the goal of this post is to teach you how you can use each social media platform for growth. That way, you can choose the right one for you.

We’ll show how you can use each platform to work with OptinMonster to have even more success:

OptinMonster is your best tool for working with social media to reach your marketing and sales goals. That’s because OptinMonster allows you to create custom “optin campaigns” that gets more customers to engage with your calls to action (CTAs).

“Optin campaigns” are small messages in the form of a popup, floating bar, fullscreen campaign, and more. These messages are most effective when they have an engaging headline, offer a lead magnet, and end with a powerful CTA.

That would look something like this:

With OptinMonster, you can build professional-grade optin campaigns in a matter of minutes, even if you have no coding experience or “tech skills.” Then you can target those campaigns to make sure they’re seen by the right people at just the right time in their customer journey.

That last part is particularly important. Because with OptinMonster, you get powerful triggers and targeting rules, like:

• Exit-Intent® Technology: Display popups as your visitors are actively trying to leave your website.
• OnSite Retargeting®: Show new campaigns to returning users to keep your lead generation strategy fresh.
• AdBlock Detection: Bypass AdBlock technologies to show your campaigns to even more of your site’s visitors.
• MonsterLinks™: Turn any campaign into a clickable link or button.

These are just a few examples of OptinMonster’s display rules, though there are many others. Not sure if all these features will work for you?

Since Social Media Examiner started using OptinMonster, they added over 250,000 subscribers to their email list.

And the best part is that OptinMonster can be the perfect tool to work with YOUR social media strategy. And, now, we’re going to show you how.

Want to see it in action for yourself? Click below to start using OptinMonster and social media to grow your business today:

BONUS: Done-For-You Campaign Setup ($297 value): Our conversion experts will design 1 free campaign for you to get maximum results – absolutely FREE!

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Let’s dive into our list of the best social media platforms for business.

1. Facebook.com

Though Mark Zuckerberg has gotten a lot of bad press over the last couple of years, there’s no denying that he built the (overall) best social media platform for business currently available.

In its third quarter of 2020, Facebook was reported to have earned $21.4 billion and a total of $78.9 billion from 12 months prior.

How is this platform generating so much income? Facebook ads.

Facebook has over 1 billion active users every day. So it’s no surprise that it’s become one of the best ways to find your target audience, build an email list, and get new customers. But that’s not all it’s good for.

It’s also a great place to interact with your clients once you’ve caught their attention. Many companies opt to create private groups on the platform where paying customers can join, interact, pose questions, and have a personalized experience with the brand.

And while Facebook’s user base has drastically slowed down over the last few years, there’s no question that it will remain one of the best social media platforms for your small business in 2020.

Bottom Line: Facebook is a tool that is right for just about any business. Though paid ads can become cumbersome and expensive, they’re totally optional. Your best bet is to have an active account to keep in touch and connect with users.

If you have the budget and time (not to mention the patience) you can look into exploring Facebook ads.

Use Facebook Pixels to Grow Your List

If you really want to take things to the next level, you can use Facebook’s tracking pixels to optimize your optin campaigns for super-fast growth.

Facebook’s ads work with an algorithm that constantly builds a more targeted audience for you. There are many factors involved, but one way you can help Facebook understand your audience is with a Facebook pixel.

These tracking pixels are put on your site. When a customer visits, the pixel will run in the background and determine if this user should see your Facebook ads at a later time.

But you can also add this feature to your optin campaigns, like popups.

Just imagine this scenario: A customer comes to your site and is looking through your content. At some point, you show them this campaign:

Your customer loves the lead magnet and decides to opt into your offer. But you’ve added a Facebook tracking pixel to this specific campaign, which means two things will now happen:

• You get a new contact on your mailing list
• Facebook knows to show this user your ads because they have a heightened interest in your business

Now each of your campaigns is working with Facebook to get you even more leads and sales.

Not only can you increase revenue through your email marketing efforts, but you’ll also see a larger ROI from your Facebook ads.

For more information, check out this helpful resource: Facebook Retargeting Ads Made Simple (& How to Install and Create a Facebook Pixel).

2. Instagram.com

Instagram is about as close to an “overnight success” story as it gets. Within two months of Instagram’s launch in 2010, it had over a million users.

Now, that number has grown to over 1 billion users each and every day, making it one of the top social media platforms for business.

Instagram started out as a platform for sharing photos and still keeps that as its core use. However, it has expanded to videos in a feature called “stories.” Thus, Instagram has become an excellent way for brands to literally show (rather than tell) their products, values, and voice.

As you can imagine, that means Instagram is an excellent tool for lead generation.

Bottom Line: Instagram is great if your audience is younger and typically shopping from mobile. Plus, Instagram created a “Checkout” feature which means it’s fully set up for eCommerce. Now, your clients can look at product images and purchase what they like directly from their Instagram account.

Grow Your Instagram Following

The big advantages of Instagram come as you gain more followers. But getting those followers isn’t always easy.

With a lead generation tool like OptinMonster, you can create campaigns that encourage users to follow you on Instagram.

In fact, you can use our pre-built template to encourage users to head over to your Instagram account:

All you need to do is make a few modifications to the text, add a picture, and insert links to your Instagram profile.

Then, in less than 3 minutes, you’ll have a campaign that redirects users to your Instagram and helps grow your following.

For more information, check out this helpful resource: Instagram Lead Generation: 12 Tips to Boost Your ROI.

Here’s another Pro-Tip for growing your email list: If you’re using WordPress, consider installing Smash Balloon:

Smash Balloon is the world’s #1 social media plugin. It will take your recent Instagram feed and display it beautifully across your site.

This gives your site’s traffic a glimpse of what your Instagram content looks like. With this added exposure, combined with a popup that redirects users to your account, you’re looking at massive jumps in your follower count.

Want to see for yourself? Try out Smash Balloon risk-free today!

3. Twitter.com

Twitter had a brilliant marketing strategy from the get-go with their character limit: give everyone a voice but limit the “noise.” Businesses, journalists, celebrities and, for better or worse, even Presidents use Twitter to share stories, news articles, or humorous anecdotes every day.

When it comes to using Twitter for business, you can definitely find ways to monetize the platform. Part of doing that is standing out from your competition, consistently engaging with your audience, and adding valuable content with all of your posts.

Bottom Line: Depending on your commitment to social media marketing, Twitter can be a powerful tool for building brand awareness and connecting directly with other customers (not to mention other influencers). Keep in mind that Twitter needs its own marketing strategy, and you’ll need to plan for multiple tweets per day.

Boost Engagement With a “Click-to-Tweet” Button

Combining OptinMonster with Twitter is easier than you might think. And at the end of this section, we’ll give you the perfect resource for mastering the combination to see more ROI from your Twitter strategy.

But one of the best ways to use these tools together is to create a “Click to Tweet” campaign:

“Click-to-Tweet” buttons are a popular part of many blogging strategies. You find a great quote from your content and encourage users to tweet it from their account with the click of a button.

Or, instead of a small quote, you can let them share the entire article by embedding the link to the post in the tweet.

Either way, it’s a great way to boost engagement on Twitter and get more social shares. How do you do it?

That’s the easy part.

Simply go to the website Click to Tweet and generate an HTML element for the tweet you want users to share:

Then you’d add HTML element generated from the website to your existing OptinMonster campaign:

These campaigns allow you to target interested readers which will improve your chances of having your content shared.

Plus, with a BIG click-to-tweet button (like in the campaign above), you make it even easier for users.

For a more full breakdown on how to create a click-to-tweet button with OptinMonster, check out our online course from OptinMonster University.

4. LinkedIn.com

LinkedIn was one of the first modern social media sites to really take hold and stick around. It’s become a networking tool exclusively for professionals and has revolutionized the way we seek, find, and get hired for jobs.

It’s also a pretty good resource for sharing content.

One thing to keep in mind about LinkedIn, however, is that you’re more likely to find business partners than new customers (unless your market includes B2B).

While this certainly isn’t a hard and fast rule, people don’t typically go to LinkedIn for entertainment or online shopping. They go to learn more about their industry, see what their professional contacts are up to, and look for new career opportunities.

Bottom Line: LinkedIn is kind of like owning a pair of nice dress shoes: you’ll likely use them less often but you should really have them in your closet. While you can (and should) show off your brand with a LinkedIn business page, its core function is tailored to individual users and expanding your professional network.

Personalize Messaging for LinkedIn Users

If you’re selling a product or service that would be good for professionals, LinkedIn and OptinMonster can be an awesome combination.

You can create campaigns that appear to people coming from specific 3rd-party sites, LinkedIn included.

That means you can create more business-oriented lead magnets and optin campaigns that your LinkedIn network would find more valuable.

When any visitor from your site comes directly from LinkedIn, you could show them more targeted campaigns, like this:

By keeping the messages geared toward what your LinkedIn audience is interested in (growing THEIR business), you can increase conversion rates, grow your contact list, and generate more leads.

For more information on how to do this, check out this helpful documentation on OptinMonster’s referral detection.

5. YouTube.com

Youtube is a remarkable video-based platform. More than any of its competition (Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok), YouTube has become the platform for sharing information via video.

It now boasts 2 billion monthly users and has become a place where people go not only for entertainment but to learn new things.

And that’s what makes it such a powerful tool for businesses.

With YouTube, you can create a video channel and connect with your users in a totally different way than other social media platforms. You can create video tutorials to back up your text-based content (like blogs), visually show product descriptions, or give personal press releases to your viewers.

The key, however, is to make sure you are optimizing your videos for YouTube SEO so they actually get views. You may also want to consider finding ways to use YouTube to grow your email list.

Bottom Line: YouTube is a great social media platform for business in 2020 and beyond. It will likely take a little time upfront to learn how to shoot and edit videos that meet users’ expectations, but you don’t need a Hollywood budget. Most up-to-date smartphones are more than capable of recording high-quality videos.

Just remember to optimize your titles and descriptions for YouTube SEO, and you’ll be well on your way to getting more traffic and conversions to your site.

Get More Views for YouTube Videos

The great thing about YouTube is that it’s super easy to embed videos across your site. They give you an embeddable code in multiple formats, so you can put your YouTube videos just about anywhere.

This is great for using YouTube with a tool like OptinMonster.

That’s because you can take your popular YouTube content, and embed them in campaigns throughout your website.

Then, you can make sure to use OptinMonster’s powerful targeting rules to show these videos to the right people and at the right time in their customer journey.

Imagine having a product demo appear in a popup or fullscreen campaign, like this one:

We built this campaign in less than 3 minutes (including the video embed).

You could design yours to match your brand’s voice, style, and messaging. Then, you could add a “Subscribe Now” button. Doing so is just as easy as creating a “Click-to-Tweet” campaign we saw earlier.

No matter how you use it, the point is clear: OptinMonster is an excellent tool to let you quickly and easily create video campaigns across your site.

These will engage your site’s traffic, encourage more visitors to take action, and even grow your YouTube subscriber count.

For more information, you might find this resource valuable: YouTube for Business: How to Start and Optimize Your Channel

6. Reddit.com

Reddit is an interesting breed when it comes to social media platforms. It’s more about genuine sharing and learning than it is about connecting and engaging. The reason is fairly straightforward: most Reddit groups have strict rules as to what you may or may not post for commercial purposes.

In fact, more often than not you’ll be removed from a group if you’re using a forum to blatantly self-advertise.

That said, a lot of companies have found massive success by engaging on Reddit. All it takes is a little creativity, lots of interaction, and a genuine desire to teach and/or learn.

Bottom Line: Reddit is a great social media platform for your business if you primarily use it for personal purposes. Because users can go through your posting history, they’ll likely investigate whether or not you are genuinely contributing to a community or if you are just there to attract visitors to your website.

That said, Reddit is highly effective at an often overlooked aspect of eCommerce: market research.

In other words, use Reddit to ask questions and get feedback on different parts of your business (ad campaigns, web design, new products, and more). Many companies pay loads of money to gather information from their audience without realizing that Reddit allows them to do that for free.

Generate Warmer Leads With Reddit

First and foremost, you need to build a genuine Reddit account before you use it for marketing purposes.

In many cases, you should use Reddit for fun to get more Karma (points used for interacting on the platform) and answer questions around your niche.

That’s because many subreddit moderators will ban new members from sharing articles and posts in their groups.

Then, after you’ve built some authority on the website, you can respond to users’ questions and redirect them to your site’s content.

When you do, you can create campaigns for the pages you’re targeting that connect more deeply with your Reddit audience.

If you were teaching your audience about email marketing, for example, you could redirect Reddit users to one of your tutorials on the topic.

Then, on that specific page, you’d use OptinMonster’s page-level targeting rules to display a campaign like this:

Since many of your Reddit users follower a thread on this specific topic, they’ll be more interested in opting into your offer.

For more information, check out this post: How to Use Page-Level Targeting to Increase Leads.

7. Pinterest.com

Depending on your company, Pinterest is one of the top social media platforms for small businesses. Founded in 2009 (and live in 2010), it’s gone from a mere 10,000 users to 291 million active users today.

While most of these users are millennials, over half are women between the ages of 25 and 54. Plus, nearly 40% of new users are men (and that trend is continuing to rise).

Oh, and people on Pinterest are spending money.

On average, Pinterest gives a $4.3 return for every $1 spent on ads which makes it a less expensive and more profitable advertising platform than Facebook or Twitter. All it takes is a consistent schedule, creative pictures, and a strategy for growing followers on Pinterest. With the right momentum, you’ll start to see more traffic and conversions in no time!

Bottom Line: Pinterest can be a great traffic driver to your site, but it’s better suited for some businesses than others. Home decor, cooking recipes, photography sites, and travel are all examples of businesses that can thrive on Pinterest.

Why? Because they have content that is typically visually appealing and easily shared.

That said, with enough creativity, nearly all businesses can use Pinterest to boost traffic. And since over 40% of Pinterest users have a household income of over $100k, it’s no wonder the platform is also great for driving conversions!

Increase Pageviews With Reddit

One thing that you can do with Pinterest users is redirect them to your site using the same method we covered for Reddit.

But once they’re on your site, you can create custom campaigns to redirect users to other popular content.

Here’s an example of what a redirect campaign would look like:

When Pinterest users are reading something and see a chance to get even more related content, a few things will happen:

• You’ll train users to start saying Yes to your offers (without asking for personal information at this stage)
• You get to show off more of your content and create more opportunities to convert traffic
• You increase pageviews on your site which, in turn, boosts your SEO efforts

By using your optin campaigns to redirect users to other pages on your site, you increase their user sessions and your pageviews.

This engagement sends positive signals to search engines like Google and helps you rank your organic content.

One method for doing this if you’re using WordPress is installing a Google Analytics tool like MonsterInsights:

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. With MonsterInsights, you can quickly find popular content in your WordPress dashboard:

Then you can create campaigns based on your page’s or post’s popularity.

This gives you a head start because you already know that your target audience shows a high interest in this content. That increases your odds that your traffic from Pinterest will find it valuable, too.

Want to use your data to build a better content marketing strategy? Try MonsterInsights risk-free today!

8. Quora.com

When most people think of the best social media platforms for business, Quora isn’t one that comes directly to mind. But maybe it should.

Quora is a good way for you to look for questions in your professional field, establish yourself as an authority, and link to content you’ve written on the topics being discussed.

But be warned: just like Reddit, moderators are good at discerning between genuine contribution to a question and blatant self-advertising. The most successful responses are those that focus on the question rather than on your own business.

Bottom Line: There’s almost no reason not to try out Quora for a couple of months. Once you make an account, start searching for questions in your field that don’t have too many responses so they are more likely to be upvoted.

Be comprehensive in your answer and only provide links to your own work that directly helps answer the question. The best format for a Quora response is typically something like:

“Hey, great question! Here’s a ton of information to answer you [no links to your own work here]. Oh, and by the way, I wrote this article a while back which might be helpful [link to the article]. Have a great day and feel free to reach out if you have any questions.”

By using the basic template above, you can be sure to use Quora to drive more traffic to your site without being banned by the platform.

How to Use OptinMonster With Quora

One excellent way to use OptinMonster with Quora is to redirect traffic to high-converting landing pages.

That’s because people who are interested enough in your topic to search for questions on Quora are super warm leads.

If you can capture a user in the exact moment that they’re searching for an answer to their question (and if YOU are the best answer), then you can make the most of this moment by turning them into customers.

What’s the best (and easiest) way to do this?

You can create powerful exit-intent popups to recover people who abandon that landing page. This is important because most people don’t make a purchase on their first visit to your site.

Here’s a good example of an exit-intent popup for your landing pages:

If you captured their attention on Quora and brought them to your landing page, you have a high probability of adding them to your email list.

Then, you can nurture the relationship over time and gain a lifelong customer.

Don’t have a landing page? No worries. You can easily create professional landing pages with SeedProd:

SeedProd is by far the top landing page builder for WordPress. It comes with tons of templates out-of-the-box to save you hours of time and headaches in the design process.

And all customizations can be done with a drag and a drop. That means you don’t need to know any code to create high-converting landing pages in minutes.

SeedProd works with modern WordPress themes, and it’s lightweight so it won’t affect your site speed.

Want to try for yourself? Start your risk-free SeedProd account today!

And that’s it! These have been the top 8 social media platforms for business.

 

When it comes to the BEST social media platform for business, there’s no magic bullet. And, remember, the list above is not exhaustive.

There are still other channels like Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Myspace (ok, you probably won’t need that last one).

But if you’re just getting started, the list provided above is a great place to start. And if you’re interested in this topic, you should probably check out these other resources:

These articles have even more information on how you can use social media with OptinMonster to successfully reach your marketing and sales goals.

Ready to get started? Sign up for your risk-free OptinMonster account today!

Nathan Thompson is a father, a writer, and a lover of travel (in that order). When he’s not wrestling with his kids, you’ll likely find Nathan giving his eyes a much-needed break from screens with a good book or planning a family trip with his awesome wife.