Persoanl Use
I believe that the current standard for social media platforms geared toward personal use is Facebook. Although not my personal favorite, it has built a strong reputation of creating environments where people create and maintain relationships all over the world. Additionally, posts by friends, popular personalities, news, updates, events, groups, and a myriad of other outlets are customized for the individuals personal use. I mainly use Facebook to keep up with friends I meet from high school, college, some colleagues I've worked with, and news updates, so my 'feed' (the stream of posts from these different people and organizations) has become fairly casual. However, Facebook as a marketing tool is pretty versatile and can be used to promote businesses, organize clubs, professional networking, and many endeavors. What may be the most beneficial to Facebook is that it has so many users. As reported by the company itself there are over one billion people active on Facebook.
There are many platforms that are able to do everything or at least most of what Facebook does, as well as companies that approach social media through a different niche. Mt favorite is actually Reddit. It is perhaps not as flashy as Facebook; it's essential a message board that doesn't necessarily demand the kind of overt self representation that Facebook does. I also appreciate how Reddit's utility is tied to particular decorum that motivates participation from its separate communities, or 'sub-Reddits.' The posts you see on its feed are driven by a voting system that users participate, and in my experience, the posts on the top are always the most fascinating, relevant, and accurate which are really important attributes.
Aside from those two, there's also Twitter, of which I have an account. The only reason I use Twitter and it's biggest claim to fame is because it is probably the fastest way to get news and updates on major events or even minor, more local ones. And in addition to this, you have other personal use social media such as Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Myspace (still there), Soundcloud (audio based), and many others.
Business Use
Many of the aforementioned platforms can and most often are also used for promoting businesses. In fact, if one desires to spend the resources on marketing at all, I would say it's almost necessary to attack that endeavor from lots of different platforms, as to reach a wider audience (not everyone is like me and just keep it to Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook). Having said that, there are platforms that do specifically market for the patronage of businesses as well as single individuals marketing themselves. I should mention that I'm not much of an expert in this area but have invested some time in to one or two of them.
One such company, and I would assume the most popular, is LinkedIn. It's much like Facebook in that you create a profile, adding a picture behooves of you so others know who you are, you identify your interests, and you opt to 'connect' (rather than Facebook's 'follow') with people within your network. The key difference here is that the intent behind LinkedIn is specific to developing one's professional network, thereby opening up opportunities for people and organizations in any industry, and not so much in the pursuit of self. With that mission in mind, it's basically a universally accessible resume which I really like about it.
Other than this big company, I would venture to say that in terms of business marketing, the platforms I mentioned earlier may be the next best environments given their popularity. Although, many job search engines like Indeed, Monster, Glassdoor, etc. also have the option of having people and business add profiles and can be considered another tactic in marketing for business use.
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