Social media is any website or application that allow people to interact and connect with others who share similar interests, beliefs, and characteristics. This type of technology allows its users to post and share information, videos, or pictures online and gives them the ability to express themselves through likes and reactions.

The term social media “platform” refers to the different social media brands, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Each platform has different functions and features. For example, Instagram is predominately an image sharing platform whereas Twitter is more focused on micro-blogging through the sharing of short-form written content.

For a business, having a social media presence is highly advantageous and can put you ahead of your competitors. It allows you to foster a strong relationship between your brand and your customers and provides them with a personal direct communication channel. For this reason, it is an excellent tool for providing high-quality customer service as you can resolve customer complaints or queries quickly and efficiently.

Not only can you connect with your existing customers, but you can also reach a whole new audience. Each social media platform has millions if not billions of users and therefore there is huge reach potential. You can raise brand awareness and spread your brand’s message far and wide with the right social media strategy.

The paid advertising capabilities of social media platforms allow you to market to and remarket to people in your target demographic. These platforms have vast amounts of data on their users and their personal characteristics and preferences. Based on this data, you can easily target the right type of people with ad campaigns resulting in more traffic to your website and more qualified leads. Moreover, the paid advertising services track your campaigns performance metrics such as impressions, engagement, and click-through rates. Therefore, you can monitor the success of your ad campaign and make adjustments if necessary.

Overall, the most popular social media platform is Facebook who has an enormous active user base of 2.797 billion people. Closely following them are YouTube with an impressive 2.3 billion users. In third and fourth place are WhatsApp and Instagram with 2 billion and 1.287 billion users respectively.

TikTok is the latest social media platform to skyrocket in popularity with 732 million users. It has grown at a rapid pace over the last two years and is quickly become the preferred platform of many teens and young adults. Other popular social media platforms include Snapchat (528 million); Pinterest (459 million); and Twitter (396 million).

This entirely depends on who your target audience is. Different platforms attract different demographics, for example, TikTok and YouTube are extremely popular with Generation Z and Millennials. On the other hand, Facebook and Pinterest tend to have slightly older users on average, and LinkedIn is used by professionals typically working in corporate jobs.

Furthermore, the geographic location could also potentially impact what platform you should choose, as some social media platform’s popularity varies from country to country.

The bottom line is you must consider which social media platform your specific target audience go to consume content. It is important to note that often the best strategy is to operate a social media campaign across numerous platforms as most people are users of more than one.

One of the major advantages of digital marketing is the ability to easily target consumers based on specific demographic, geographical, behavioural, and psychographic criteria. Search engines like Google or social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have already built up a lot of data about their users including their interests, likes and dislikes. Using this data, you can set your ad campaigns to target very specific sets of users. For example, if you had a shop in Aberdeen selling trendy sports apparel, you could set your digital ad campaign to target 18–24-year-olds based in and around the Aberdeen area that have an interest in the gym and exercising.

Moreover, tools like Google Analytics allow you to easily track and monitor the success of an ad campaign as they provide data and metrics on the number of impressions, clicks, traffic and conversions an ad receives. So, if a campaign isn’t going as well as you would like, you can simply make some adjustments to the targeting.

Another benefit of digital advertising is the ability to remarket. If someone clicks on or engages with an online ad, then that advert may reappear for that person multiple times. This is to remind the person that they have shown interest in a product/ service and to influence them to follow through with the purchase. Another way this can be achieved is through email marketing. Often when potential leads leave items in their online shopping cart but fail to check out, they will receive an email reminding them of the items in their cart and offering them a 10% off promotion to encourage them to buy. Remarketing using either of these methods is an effective way to increase sales.