The Best Social Media Platform to Learn from

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Contrary to what some will tell you, random scrolling can be good for you. Yes, you may waste a lot of time by using your free time to see what everyone else is up to. But if you have a mission in mind when you’re using social media, there’s a lot you can learn from it. In fact, I would argue that using one of the following platforms is guaranteed to benefit aspiring online business entrepreneurs.

When I talk about ‘learning’ in this context, I mean the ability to use these platforms to get as strong of an understanding about people and the way that they behave online. The better you understand this, the easier it is to hone in on niches for your online businesses and market to them with whatever product or service you’re pushing.

Obviously, demographics will play a huge factor in whether the following is true of the industry you tend to operate in, but I’ve found that the top of this list to be the single most beneficial platform for my business ideas over the past five or so years.

For me, social media research has formed the basis of:

Market research
Competitor analysis
Brand guidelines
Tone of voice guidelines

You can do a lot of this passively if you’re on the right platforms, following the right accounts. Before I get to the best, I’ll eliminate the rest.

Snapchat

I may be wrong about this because of my lack of interaction with it, but I’d say the main thing you can learn from Snapchat is how to master ethereal marketing techniques, but I’d say that you would need at least one other platform to pull most campaigns off. I could be wrong, but I don’t see as much benefit from this as the other social media platforms.

Instagram

Believe it or not, there are many different uses for Instagram beyond your own thirst traps and beauty flat lays. It’s possible to make whole businesses based on an Instagram following alone. Unlike my favourite, it fundamental restricts productive conversation between its users. Because of that I’d say it’s more helpful to learn the importance of imagery that stands out, and how to cultivate a community around your output.

While you can create your own content for it, curation is the name of the game on Pinterest. The boards people put together can give you a strong understanding of the things people desire. As a tool for product research, it’s easily one of the best ones out there, but you don’t get the luxury of seeing any discourse.

Facebook

Full of distractions, if you allow it to be, Facebook is the easiest way to find most people online. Over time it’s gone from a very open platform to one that accepts that people want personal profiles, but may not necessarily want the rest of the world to see what they’re up to (unlike the rest).

It’s the biggest forum you’ve ever come across. Reddit is amazing for research about pretty much anything. While you’re not going to have as many real life profiles, you get to see how people think about particular topics, products and services. The anonymity means that you can easily steer conversation yourself to get whatever insights you need.

Twitter

Twitter is unmatched in presenting an industry/scene/sector culture in its most authentic form. Beneath all of the dry content from those trying their hardest not to maintain a squeaky clean image, Twitter is a platform for real discussion. It allows people from all over the world to seamlessly search and interact with one another based around topics of interest.

Unlike the others, where things feel compartmentalised by individual posts, boards or pages, it’s a lot more fluid and expected for its users to search for new content and contribute to it. There’s something about the immediacy of it that makes it feel more true-to-life, where other platforms don’t give the same impression.

Tools like FollowerWonk make it possible to extract and analyse masses of accounts in one go, helping you to identify accounts of interest that could inspire your brand/product/concept’s direction.