Running a business had never been at a more paradoxical position since the inception of the professional management era (the 1920s – 1960s). Things have been everything but normal. With a slight effort in the right direction; we have seen companies rising from a hearse to the zenith of their dominance. With a war being fought between every day for the dominance of the market, knowing how to win over allies has been more crucial than ever. These allies who help empires rise or fall are the everyday ‘clicks’ and the ‘presses’ of buttons.

Social media has brought the world closest than what it has ever been and social media marketing has been the rage ever since our ‘Orkut’ accounts were ‘the thing’. Using social media for business growth is the frenzy and need of the hour and the information out there that proves that the right social media strategies are necessary, is huge. To look better into it, let’s look at some of the social media facts out there:

1. The sheer size of the audience you can reach.

-Let’s look at the population of the world right now which amounts to somewhere around 7.6 Billion. Internet attracts around 51% of all the global population.

-With that much audience already waiting to be reached, 91% of all the retail businesses or brands use a little around 2 or more social media channels.

-38% of all businesses on social media on average spent 20% or more of their total advertisement budget in 2015 and thus,

-Social media networks have been generating a lot of income via the advertising of businesses which numerically would be around $8.3 Billion in 2015. This figure more than quadrupled in 2016 touching close to $40 billion.

2. Facebook has always been a social media giant and to put it into figures

-Each day, 500,000 users are added to its ever-growing social presence. Organic users in that number are somewhere around 76% and consumers use the Facebook account to log in to publishing and branding websites each day.

-Facebook attracts more mature audience as the young crowd (15-25 years of age) spend more time on Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter and thus businesses can and do use tools like Audience Targeting which Facebook advertising provides to target more affluent audiences. A better example would be that you can target all women in an age group of 45-65, living in Delhi or in 10-mile radius from your business with an income of 15+ Lakhs per annum for your product.

-Also be informed that posts perform well during a certain time of day. According to Hubspot, anything posted on Facebook at 3:00 PM on a Wednesday and 1:00 – 4:00 PM on Thursdays and Fridays will be the most optimum time. Some other ones would be a Saturday post between 12:00 – 1:00 PM and a Sunday post between 1:00 – 4:00 PM and thus you can plan your social media strategies around it.

3. Tweets make a noise louder than you expect

-92% of all the interaction any user has comes from link clicks which means every tagged profile and links will be clicked to somewhere.

-At the same time, Twitter hosts an audience of 78% which looks forward to a response to a complaint to a brand within an hour.

-Another surprising fact would be that tweets with hashtags performed no better than tweets without tags.

4. The very visual Instagram.

-Instagram has been one of the most active brand hubs. Used by somewhere around 48.8% of brands Instagram is still a playfield for a lot of big players to join.

-The only reason for that is, Instagrammers play! 75% of all the users do follow up with the links by the brands and visit websites from an advertising post.

-This can be optimized by adding a hashtag to your post. This makes your post perform 12.6% better in terms of engagement. This can be even more effective when tagged with a user by 56% and 79% when tagged with a location.

5. Snapchat aims small, misses’ small.

-The attention span of an average adult is currently measured to about 8 seconds. This proves to be the perfect length of marketing content Snapchat can pump out day in and day out.

-During a small study performed with the audience from ages 15-56, Snapchat ads captured the attention of the audience twice as well as Facebook ads and 1.5 times better than ads on Insta6. The visual prowess of YouTube.gram.

-The paid marketing offered by Snapchat allows businesses to run ads between stories which effectively allows them to design better social media strategies.

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6. The visual prowess of YouTube.

-YouTube reported a 40 billion views of branded content in 12 months’ time in 2015 which was viewed by the staggering 1.5 billion active users per month.

-Half of all those views were generated from mobile devices. All of this was generated during an average of the 40-minute viewing session.

7. Visual Content does better, each time, every time!

-Without even a hint of doubt, 90% or more people will always prefer a visual content like images and videos than a written content. Reading takes too much time and effort.

-A study by Venngage.com stated that over 300 online marketers were approached and surveyed, according to them with less than 5 hours a week spent on making the visual content, 41.5% of the total marketers saw the info-graphics and illustrations performing best.

-Closely behind was charts and data visualization with 25.7% and videos and presentation performing best at 20.2%.

8. Good quality content always gives you the edge.

-Wordpress looks at 91.8 million blog posts published each month. At the same time the top three marketing strategies for all kind of content would include social media content at 83%, blogs at 80% and email newsletters (77%).

-A study done by content marketing institute also shows that 89% of all business to business marketers use content marketing strategies which show that all top performing marketers deliver consistent content of the top notch quality.

9. SEO (and not just Google’s).

-Optimizing search would enable the marketer to better reach a wider audience. Google adwords was a revolutionary tool and has made several businesses to work extensively on their ad campaign specifically for Google.

-While the Google advertisement services have been performing well, it is important to treat all social platforms as a search engine too. Your content should stand out optimized and marketers should ensure that their identity remains unique across all social platforms and can thus use social media for business growth.

10. Reach out to help your customers.

While reaching out should be one of the prime Social Media strategies, customers spend well if you assist them in their struggle on a social platform. Companies who have been helping their customers on a social platforms saw the customers spending anywhere between 20%-40% more as a sign of their trust in the company’s customer support and engagement.

To look back at it all, the above mentioned social media facts allows any budding business or marketing team to devise a better campaign for social media for business growth. Hence the ever-raging war can be dominated with a little insight into your business and how you can let it shadow the social media platform.