The Most Effective Social Media channel in 2017

@ValaAfshar

Social media, without any contest, is the most widely used digital marketing channel ever, and the most effective. The reason for that is because every smartphone or mobile device comes pre-installed with series of social media apps. There are 3.8 billion mobile phone users worldwide and 2.3 billion of that number are active on social media and 2 billion or 52% of that are mobile social media users. Mobile phone users make up about 54% of the 7.4 billion world population. 

These are quite impressive statistics, the question therefore is not whether social media leads the pack of digital marketing channels, but rather, which social media channel produces the highest returns? Social media, just as it is popular, also has many channels, totaling over 200 recognized sites, and therefore, requires careful study and understanding of the trends in the social media industry to identify the most effective channels that can deliver your marketing strategy effectively.

One of the criteria for choosing the right social media channels, is by considering the number of users either regionally or globally; and that is not the only consideration. There are also other important factors such as ROI and market segmentation. Let us look at Facebook for example, in terms of number of users, it tops all other sites with two billion active users worldwide. Whereas LinkedIn with just about 420 million users, is still the top B2B social media site. 

Therefore, to base your selection criteria of the social media platform that is the most effective, on their total number of users us not always the right strategy. Coming up with the right social media marketing mix is key to the successful implementation of your marketing strategy. Some social media platforms are better for certain business segments. For instance, promoting a movie, YouTube with 1.5 billion users, is the best channel to use. Making a wrong choice of channel for your advertising or marketing campaign may produce detrimental consequences.

Some social media channels have large number of users globally, but perform dismally when used wrongly. WhatsApp is a typical example of such social media platforms, which has the second largest number of 1.2 billion users worldwide, but ranks as one of the least effective digital marketing channel. While the number of users still play a significant part in determining the platform to use in each market segment, socials play a crucial role when developing a market strategy.

Market Segment Leaders

Social media channel	Segment
1.       LinkedIn	B2B
2.       YouTube	Video
3.       Facebook	Content/Video
4.       Twitter	News/Gossip
5.       WhatsApp	Short messaging
6.       Ghost	Blogging
7.       SportsFanLive	Sports
8.       Stella Stories	Photography

Throwing the spotlight on some of the top social media channels and classifying them by market segment, and comparing their performance will help social media managers, digital marketers and advertising campaign managers in making good choices of the social media mix they want to use when implementing their marketing strategy.

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