To define which social media channel is best for your business, you have to ask yourself a few things.
What does the word ‘Benefit’ mean to you?
There are a lot of social channels that benefit your business in different ways. It is important to narrow it down and think about what exactly ‘benefit’ means to your business. What are your goals?
Here are some of the most common benefits of using social media that you might want to focus on:
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Improve your relationship with existing clients and provide a platform in which customers can communicate with your business.
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Brand awareness and reaching out to a new audience and new demographics who may be receptive to your services.
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Boosting sales, increasing traffic to your site and learning about your customers wants and habits.
Where is your audience?
The whole point of using social media marketing is to get your business in contact with your target audience. You need to research where your key demographic is spending their time. Once you have found them, you can start to create meaningful relationships and find new customers and clients.
There are easy ways to find where your audience is on social. With a bit of research, you can tell through statistics where your audience is. Ways you can go about researching your audience includes;
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Survey your customers
Use free tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to survey your clients or customer to find out what social channels they are using.
- Upload your email database
Almost every social platform allows you to upload your email database and connect with your customers on there. This is great for jumpstarting your online networking
- Using ads.twitter.com
It doesn’t have the granular targeting tools of Facebook, but you can still find and reach your audience based on geography, gender, keywords, interests, influencers.
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Facebook Ads Manager.
Facebook Ads manager gives you a huge range of options to choose when narrowing an audience and will then deliver you a projected reach on the platform.
Finally, what kind of content are you creating?
Different types of content work better with certain social media platforms, so it’s integral that you consider the type of content you like to create and that works best with your brand. Content types you may focus on include:
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After that, pair your goals, audience and content with the right platform
After you have narrowed your audience and goals, you can then go through and compare the different social media platforms to determine which one will best meet your needs. To help you decide, here's a rundown of the top four platforms and what they are best used for:
According to Statista, Facebook is the largest platform boasting over 2 billion active users. This platform would most benefit the goal of brand awareness.
With their dynamic advertising platform that rivals that of Google. Their advertising tools can be highly customised to target very specific audiences. Bare in mind, Facebook is to show the human side of your business and it used to forge close relationships with new and old clients and customers. Using it for straight up sales won’t be effective.
Twitter is a great tool for communicating and bonding with your current clients and customers. However, with it’s rapidly declining monthly active users and lack of an effective algorithm Twitter won’t get your business out there to the millions.
Twitter is great for local business and engaging with your followers and your community quickly and effectively. Twitter is a great for updating people of real-time events and news, however, bad for long lasting and meaningful posts.
LinkedIn is proven to be best if your goal is lead generation. While the platform has the lowest number of active users out of all the biggest platforms, the people on LinkedIn tend to be business-orientated.
LinkedIn can help you establish your company as a trusted leader in your field, build authority for your brand, and engage leads through conversations.
If your content is aesthetically pleasing images or videos, used in the right way, Instagram can serve to be the best place for engagement and interactions with new customers.
When TrackMaven analysed 51 million posts from 40,000 different companies over 130 industries, it was found that Instagram came out with the greatest engagement rate per follower. However, where Instagram fails, is the follow through. With not much room for links and redirects it can be hard to drive your Instagram audience anywhere else but Instagram.
Social media is a marketing tool like no other and something everyone can take advantage of quite easily. With careful consideration and research, you can find the perfect social channel that can meet your needs, form a closer bond with your audience, and develop a return on investment.