The importance of marketing in today’s time cannot be stressed enough. According to DataReportal, 4.33 billion users or 55 percent of the total global population use social media across the world. This makes social media a great opportunity for brands to reach their target audience and increase brand awareness among users.
Today, we’ll be covering some of the top social media apps and their differences to help you choose the perfect platform for your business:
1. DISCOVERABILITY
Brands have the opportunity to create content from a variety of options that include Stories, Posts, Reels, Stories, IGTV and Shops. The social media platform provides brands with the opportunity to develop unique ways of promoting their brand and products with the help of these tabs:
Posts
An Instagram post is where users can upload multiple posts and videos on the account’s profile for other users to view. To ensure your post garners maximum engagement, adding hashtags can make your content post more accessible to users.
Reels
Instagram Reels has made the competition fierce for the popular short-form video app TikTok since Instagram offers not only Reels but many other options to promote your brand. Reels are short-form video content that can be shared to Instagram users. Brands also have a higher chance at reaching their target audience since Instagram features Reels on the basis of a user’s likes and preferences for similar content.
Stories
Brands can share Instagram Stories that last for 24 hours on their account profile. If you’d like to feature the Story in your account profile for a longer duration, Instagram offers the Highlights feature to add the Story to your timeline. The feature is similar to Snapchat that also allows users to share content for a limited 24-hour period.
Shops
The Shops tab helps users to view products promoted by brands and creators. The feature helps users to Shop on Instagram and also supports small businesses to build an online audience and feature their products on a popular social media platform.
IGTV
IGTV allows users to upload long-form video content on Instagram. Brands can share their brand collections, promotional trailers and more in this tab.
Snapchat
In Snapchat, the Discover tab is exclusively available to brands, creators and publishers to feature their content. According to a study, Snapchat users spend 35% more time in the Discover tab daily. Snapchat’s TikTok-like feature Spotlight also helps businesses to be discovered easily using short-form video clips.
Moreover, Snapchat provides the Public Profiles for Businesses feature where brands can feature their products, stories and more to better uplift their brand on Snapchat.
TikTok
TikTok is a short-form video platform popularly known for its algorithm that helps users easily interact with content on the platform. TikTok states that their ‘For You’ page algorithm focuses on user interactions, video features (hashtags, audio etc), device and account information.
2. DEMOGRAPHICS
Instagram’s reach over a large audience of one billion active monthly users is unmatched in comparison to Snapchat and TikTok. A majority of Instagram’s user base belongs to the 25-34 age group, followed by the 18-24 year-old age group category. Although the Gen Z group falls only second, Instagram is the third most-preferred social media app in comparison to Snapchat and TikTok.
In terms of location, Instagram users mainly come from 4 locations: India, the United States, Brazil and Indonesia.
Snapchat
Snapchat reports approximately 280 million users that daily use the platform with 75% of the global user data includes millennials and Gen Z. Snapchat’s largest audience includes countries such as the United States, India, France and the United Kingdom.
TikTok
TikTok is home to 689 million monthly active users across the globe of which 41 percent of the population comprises the 16-24 age group. TikTok has also been titled as the most downloaded app in 2020 with a staggering 850 million downloads.
TikTok attracts a large audience from countries such as the United States, Indonesia, Russia and Japan. India was previously among the top demographic with over 200 million users, however, the TikTok ban in 2020 has decreased the number of TikTok users on the platform.
3. ENGAGEMENT RATES
According to the study from Bannersnack, Carousel posts garner the highest engagement rate (1.94%), followed by images (1.74%) and video posts (1.45%). Instagram highlights its Stories feature is used by 500 million accounts among which one-third belong to businesses. Instagram Stories lead to one in five users reaching out to the accounts via Direct Message.
Snapchat
Snapchat users have been reported to be 60% more likely to make impulse purchases and are 20% more likely to make purchases on mobile devices. In 2020, Snapchat revealed that over 180 million users engage with AR technology on their platform.
TikTok
TikTok boasts of an organic engagement rate ranging from 3% to 9%, depending on the number of followers. Brands usually choose to drive engagement on their social media account by launching viral challenges and hashtags.
Example: Guess had earlier launched the #InMyDenim Hashtag Challenge to target the millennials and Gen Z population on the platform. The challenge promoted users to share their unique fashion style and share their video alongside the hashtag. The six-day challenge amassed 5,550 user-generated videos, 10.5 million views, 14.3% engagement rate and 12,000 additional followers.
