The beginning of July brought fireworks, hot dogs, the 4th of July……AND a new social media platform!
During the first week of July, Meta introduced Threads, a new platform for real-time conversations and sharing. Within the first 48 hours, it had surpassed 70 million signups. With similarities to Twitter – users in both apps can engage with the posts they see by liking, replying, and sharing – Meta has provided a familiar and easy-to-use alternative.
Threads currently does not offer advertising or monetization on the platform, but chances are that will change in the future. Since it does exist within the Meta ecosystem, if advertising does become available, it will likely be a relatively easy addition to existing social media strategies.
For small and medium sized businesses and social media teams, adopting something new doesn’t – and shouldn’t – happen overnight. If you’re curious about Threads, now is a perfect time to experiment and test out organic content. Everyone – including Meta – is figuring out Threads in real time.
While Threads isn’t offering advertising opportunities currently, there are a number of other proven social media platforms other than Facebook that may make sense for your business.
LinkedIn provides a way to engage on social media within the professional realm. The major advantage of LinkedIn marketing is that you can reach trustworthy professionals to drive actions relevant to your business and goals. Another advantage is the first-party data available just through someone’s profile. You can distinguish one’s job, position, what company and how long they’ve been employed, education, previous employers, skills, and who they are connected to. LinkedIn provides a vast number of targeting tactics such as company size, groups of interest, education, location and geography, and more that can further ensure that your dollars are being spent correctly.
People come to Twitter with a discovery mindset, so you can offer a lasting impression on those who are served your ads. The audience on Twitter is more likely to be passionate, engaged, and open to learning than those on other social media sites. People spend 25% more time viewing ads on Twitter than other leading platforms. Twitter has a vast and detailed process of providing you with the correct audience for your campaign. You can pinpoint based on demographics (location, language, platform, device, age, and gender). Then you can further split those groups into targeting based on event, tweet engager, keyword, movies, tv, interest, conversation, and more.
Pinterest is used by those who want something new, but don’t have an exact idea in mind. Advertising on this platform offers brand awareness, conversions, offline sales, and more traffic. It can be used as a visual search engine – which makes this platform a standout for retail, ensuring ads are relevant to what the pinners are searching for. Pinterest offers ways to find the perfect target audience for your business or campaign. They allow targets to be split based on demographics (age, gender, location, or language), interests, keywords, customer lists (reaching those who engage with your website, store or previous ads), and ‘actalike’s.’
While Reddit hasn’t always been recognized as part of the social media landscape, it’s gaining some traction in recent years. Second only to TikTok in terms of growth in 2021, Reddit is a diverse channel filled with interests that run the gamut of nearly every hobby, topic, or interest you could imagine. With over 3 million subreddits (collections of communities), Reddit can likely help you zero in on your target audience. While Reddit has fewer users than Facebook or Instagram, it makes up for it in user engagement. You can target by interest, communities, or custom audiences. An ideal audience size is approximately 1M users, so given the niche nature of the platform, it is not recommended to run campaigns at anything less than a state-wide geography.
Knowing which platform to utilize can be tricky – focusing on your goals and target audience is key. Every social media platform can be strong when used correctly – timing, budget allocation, messaging and creative images are all important factors for success. We’re here to help you further develop your social marketing strategy!
