Which Social Media Platforms Should My Business Be On?
As a business seeking more traffic and conversions, you realise the importance of online outreach. With social media evolving as the centre of the digital marketing industry, you know that’s where you have to be to see exponential growth.
You may already have a social media presence, but have found that it’s not where you want to be. Or perhaps you have no presence at all, and are looking for ways to gain a foothold in the industry. There are numerous options available at your disposal: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, Vine, Snapchat and Tumblr – but which ones are right for your brand? What is right for your business? And how can you maximise the ROI in digital marketing?
Here, we will discuss what’s important when it comes to choosing your platform as well as the nuances of interacting with your audience through each channel.
But first, it’s vital that you understand that the building and maintenance of a social media presence can be expensive and time-heavy. Winning followers, subscribers and customers doesn’t come easy, and there’s no way to suddenly win innumerable online followers.
Like anything of value, it takes time to achieve. With this in mind, it’s imperative that you focus your recourses in choosing the most relevant social media tools from the get-go. Don’t jump the gun and simply pick social media platforms out of a hat – you have to know where to target them.
1. Who Is Your Audience?
The most important factor in deciding the channels you should utilise is your target market. What platforms do they use the most? This is where you need to direct your efforts. Each social media channel contains its own identity. This identity is formed by the user demographic and that demographic’s interests.
Thankfully there are only a small number of relevant social channels for any given business, so you don’t have to spend countless hours finding the right one. If you know who your audience is and what social network they subscribe to, you can target them right at the source.
2. The Differences Between Platforms
Now that you understand why choosing the right platforms is imperative to success, we can now move onto how you should communicate through these channels. Social media is, funnily enough, a lot like social living. You wouldn’t act the same way with your friends as you would your coworkers – you have to gauge the vibe and environment. The same goes for social media.
Some businesses make the mistake of utilising all social media channels as equal distribution networks without specifying content for each channel. If possible, it is important to produce unique content for each channel. However, this can be expensive and time-consuming, in which case you want to modify your overall message to be more suitable for each platform. Why? Because in doing so you will increase brand awareness and harbour authentic customer interaction.
It is important to first decide which platforms are most suitable for your business before putting in the time, effort and capital into producing quality content. After you’ve done this, you should approach each platform as individually as possible. This will help expose your brand to a wider audience without posting the wrong content.
