Pros and Cons for 5 Social Media Platforms

In this week’s agency article, we circle back to where we started our first article, social media! I wanted to do a brief overview of the four vital social platforms that are used most often, and explain the pros and cons of each one. When picking your first platform to create and post content in, it’s necessary to know the general sense of social media application, whether it’s focused heavily on captions or appealing photos, for example, are dramatic guidelines that will have a direct performance on your likes, followers, and engagement.

Moving forth, let’s begin with arguably the most popular social media application, Instagram. Instagram is a mobile photo-sharing app, but it is also a social network. It's like Twitter with followers, only instead of real-time text updates, you provide photo updates. As humans are generally very visual creatures, Instagram takes advantage of this by being an entirely visual-only platform.

Instagram Pros

• Visual centric approach

• In-app editing

• Fast, easy and efficient to use

• Best engagement

  • The most likely platform for high engagement

Instagram Cons

• Relies on visuals, not very verbal

• Smartphone only

  • Viewers are almost always viewing on a smartphone

  • Can only post content on a smartphone

• Can’t embed links

• DMs are lacking

  • Not as polished as twitter

• Spam bots

  • “Fake” followers

Next, we have Facebook, the platform with the largest amount of users. According to Facebook's latest mission statement, the ideal use of Facebook is that people use it to stay connected with friends and family, discover what's going on in the world and share and express what matters to them.

Facebook Pros

• Most users

• Friends and family

  • Act as support

• Embeddable links

• App plugins

• All-in-one place

  • Contact info, website, reviews, photo albums

Facebook Cons

• Favors paid content

  • Organic followers are difficult to find, low visibility and low engagement

• Negative feedback stands out

  • More likely to have a lasting impact

Continuing, we have Twitter. Twitter is a website for sharing what you are doing at any given moment with other people online. In more complicated terms, Twitter is a powerful social networking tool for both business and personal use. Twitter uses "tweets," which are the 140-character (maximum) messages you post to your Twitter profile. The restriction on length is one of the features that makes Twitter unique compared with other social networking sites.

Twitter Pros

• Microblogging

  • aka short and sweet statements

• Simple content

• Easy to have a conversation with others

• Quick response

• Retweet options

  • Favors noticeability

Twitter Cons

• Getting noticed is difficult with the abundance of users

  • Only have words to your disposal to become noticeable rather than visuals

• Character limit

Almost wrapping up, Pinterest is next on the list. Pinterest is a social network that allows users to visually share, and discover new interests by posting (known as 'pinning' on Pinterest) images or videos to their own or others' boards (i.e. a collection of 'pins,' usually with a common theme) and browsing what other users have pinned.

Pinterest Pros

• Users BUY here

• Referral traffic

• Timeless content

  • A keyword can trigger your content)

• Visual

  • Not as rigid as other platforms

Pinterest Cons

• Niche audience

• Fewer users

• Exclusive content

• 71% women

  • Can be difficult if your target demographic is men

• Requires image(s)

Last but certainly not least is the social media app that blasted off with popularity in the last couple of years, TikTok. TikTok is a social media platform for creating, sharing, and discovering short music videos, almost like Karaoke for the digital age.

TikTok Pros

• Large young audience demographic

• Brand exposure to millions of users

• Chance to get creative

  • A lot of different tools to make your content stand out

• Reach new markets

  • TikTok is available in 155 countries with over 75 different languages

TikTok Cons

• Expensive ads

• Not suitable for an audience over 30 years old

• Advert censorship is common

  • Owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, ad censorship has been acknowledged by the app’s users

With the familiarities of these platforms, you can dominate your social media presence. However, choosing where to start can be quite difficult, and your goals, audience, content style should all be taken into consideration when choosing one platform over the other.

I hope this pros and cons list made it easy and handy to get a grasp of your desirable social media platform you’ll use!