How to Choose the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business
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Most digital marketers use social media platforms to promote their services and products. It permits them to reach out to a wider audience with ease. This trend will see itself growing and branching out in the years to come through social media marketing services. So, let’s look at what social media has in store for us.
As a society, we live in a digital era, which means that even a small percentage of your brand’s presence on social media can create an impact. In fact, your brand’s online presence matters to the extent that if you are not accessible through social media, consider your brand to be an invisible part of your specific industry.
After 2020, it was gravely unsafe to visit stores physically, and therefore, the presence of existing online channels became stronger. Additionally, new online platforms started to emerge as a means to reach the audience and to create necessary growth and impact for businesses. This is how most of the e-commerce and corporate businesses started to thrive and flourish – through online transactions.
So, the pool of social media platforms grows every year. We’ve researched and come to identify the platforms that will change the marketing trends in the years to come.
However, before sharing the social media platforms; get a first-hand understanding of the factors that go into choosing a social media platform.
Factors That Go Into Choosing a Social Media Platform
While it can be tempting to be present on all social media platforms out there, it can put your content team under a lot of pressure. They have to deliver content for platforms that might possibly work or not, seasonally, or never!
Also, as a sound social media strategy and consistency is the key to social media marketing that again adds to the complex dynamics of the process. And this process requires understanding your audience.
Understand Your Audience
So, if you want to understand your audience, you need to make user personas of those who are most likely to buy your products and services. Analyse your web traffic and tweak those personas, until you get a clearer picture of who your potential audience is.
Largely, you should have an answer to the following:
- Demographics of your target audience, including age group, gender, and location
- Content consumption patterns and preferences: content formats that are most popular with your demographic, how the content is consumed, and where
- Interests outside of your product or service
- The more detailed buyer personas are, the better your chances of honing in on the right social media platforms. For instance, if your ideal buyer is an urban dweller in the 16-25 age bracket, who largely consumes visual content via mobile devices, Instagram should be your top priority, together with YouTube.
Define Your Goal
While your ultimate goal is, always, to increase your sales and revenues, how you want to get there is what counts. Strategically, you have to decide what it is that you want out of your social media marketing efforts.
For example, if building brand loyalty is your priority, Facebook could be your best bet, since it allows you to create communities and engage people. However, if you are after brand awareness, Twitter and Instagram are, perhaps, the most suitable options.
Both the platforms use hashtags for content discovery, which increases your chances of finding new audiences.
Facebook, despite its huge user base, isn’t ideal for brand awareness. Since the social media platform is so crowded, your content does not always reach a lot of people, unless you have a big marketing budget to spend on Facebook ads.
You can connect with our digital marketing services department to understand the best platform that will meet your brand marketing goals.
Follow Your Competitors
If you are not very sure about where your ideal target audience spends most of its time online, take a cue from your competitors. Follow 2-3 industry leaders in your space and see what platforms they are most active on.
Analyse where they are getting the most engagement from and follow suit.
A Social Media Cheat Sheet to Help You Decide
Typically, it will take some A/B testing to figure out where to concentrate your social media marketing efforts. However, here’s a starter’s guide to the most popular social media platforms out there and what they have to offer.
Twitch
If you’ve never heard of this platform before, remember that your customers might already be present here. What is Twitch? It is a live streaming platform where content creators can interact with their audience in real-time. This platform is mostly used by video game lovers.
Twitch allows you to record yourself as you work. In the process, it lets your audience watch and engage with you, sharing live feedback. Wouldn’t this be an amazing way to advertise your business? There are so many ways you can get creative while posting stuff out there!
On a daily basis, Twitch has over 30 million visitors, aged between 16 and 40 years old. The platform allows you to connect one-on-one with your targeted audience. Are you a B2B brand? Twitch is your definite gameplay.
Streamers on Twitch can make a living through ads, subscriptions, donations, and so on. This depends on whether you are a musician, personal trainer, cook, fashion blogger, life coach, and video game creator, among other professionals who provide non-material products and services.
Discord
Brands can use Discord to build a server for their customers and offer members different perks. It’s a place where you can join multiple groups of like-minded people and interests. This way, the platform becomes a place where people share their opinions, which means that Discord is a great way to gather feedback, develop a customer base and improve customer loyalty.
Native advertising is not a feature on this platform, but Discord offers businesses a medium to truly connect with their audience.
Reddit! What can we say about the most visited website in the world? It was founded in 2005, and then there was no turning back – people loved it! If you are targeting a US audience, Reddit has most of its traffic from there! Worldwide, they have 430 million active users.
Ok, in all honesty, it’s not exactly a trending social media platform but it is considered the front page of the internet. Add a query and type Reddit at the end of the query, you’ll most definitely find a Reddit search results thread concerning your topic in the query.
Who uses this platform? – Communities from mechanics, PC builders, sports lovers, art fanatics, and e-learners.
Reddit was not always big on upgrading its platform. However, look forward to using it, because the changes have come through.
The platform is planning to ban controversial communities, build new tech, test new content formats, and experiment with new business models. Talk about adapting with new times – better late than never!
However, here are a few warning factors you need to heed:
- Reddit has a tight community and dislikes self-promotion.
- Subreddits have rules against posting for profit. And no matter the loophole you look for, Reddit finds a way to catch you if you are being promotional.
But, there’s no reason to walk away just yet! Reddit offers a solution.
Start by giving value and then do the following:
- Create an account on Reddit
- Go digging for all the subreddits your brand targets. Type “Reddit + [industry keyword]” and find your target audience accordingly.
- Listening is key for any marketer. So, browse and get a sense of the kind of content that really engages your audience on Reddit.
- Do not add a comment for the sake of it, in fact, engage meaningfully, give an upvote, and comment selfless and valuable information. This means, hire your brand expert who has free time (real free time) to answer questions, discuss and share jokes.
- Share and create content that resonates with your targeted community. How will you know what works? You may have done some previous research on your target audience; that may help?
Facebook is one of the most over utilized social media platforms with a stunning 6+ billion users. That is why Facebook is still going strong in the marketing world. Almost everyone knows about Facebook, and almost everyone owns an account on this platform.
Facebook proves to be an excellent channel for both organic reach and paid promotion. It also provides you with features that help interact with customers through live videos and published stories.
That said, even today, Facebook Ads shine through for most brands that know how to invest. It proves to be the best tool to reach out to the potentially new target audience. Facebook is great for making potential conversion into a real deal.
At 300 million+ monthly active users, the micro-blogging platform commands a sizable user base. Hashtags allow for quick content discovery and for sharing breaking news.
Some brands also use Twitter for quick customer support, thereby increasing trust among users.
Best for: Brand awareness; and finding content ideas that will resonate with your audience
Instagram gifted us with Instagram Reels. Reels are short-form videos that provide the means to significantly expand marketing possibilities.
This platform represents the visual aspect of your product or service in the most effective way. As of today, Instagram has become the unparalleled platform where visual representation is second to none. It is fun, modern, and casual. And many brands selling products can use this platform as a virtual shopping opportunity.
Need a solid visual campaign? Instagram beats competition hands down with IGTV and fun Reels. Just a simple video can boost sales and bring in the footfalls.
Instagram offers short video snippets but for verified accounts, you get to post videos that extend up to 60 minutes. This platform is filled with crowd-pulling influencers and vloggers, who are available to collaborate with brands to promote their business and products.
It doesn’t end here! You can promote your product catalog through the feature called Instagram Shop. The platform offers a straightforward way to enable customers to easily buy products from their app. It’s a great way to do business as it’s all about making the customer’s journey easier, and Instagram does just that!
YouTube
YouTube is a great platform for boosting your connection with the target audience.
The videos you upload to attract the right audience depends on what you are feeding them. This means that what will truly make your audience happy to watch? Identifying the content buckets that work on YouTube is distinct from what you would ideally share on any other platform unless they work across all media.
So, if you’re wondering where to start, well, you could try How-to videos as they are super trending, and people love to learn something new and interesting. Does your brand have the capability to educate users through entertainment?
Furthermore, YouTube integrates with Google Ads, which means that your marketing team can pay to enable more views for their videos. At the same time, you can use relevant keywords and optimize the videos through SEO activities.
Pinterest can be your two-in-one platform if you use it wisely. It is both social media and a search engine from a visual perspective. Many people come to this platform for inspiration, and therefore, it proves to be a great place to connect with new people.
Pinterest marketing is the 14th largest social media platform with over 400 million active users worldwide. So, you can create a Pinterest strategy, including the use of high-quality images to advertise your brand. Remember that this is a fun platform so you need to be entertaining, or for that matter, pleasant enough to encourage the right audience to your brand on their personal boards.
There are product pins, shop features, and adverts as options to use on this platform. Therefore, creating fun content and using SEO-optimized copies can inspire your audience to reach out to you.
When trying to market your brand on this platform, it’s important to understand what it’s all about, who are mostly present here and their objective to be a part of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn serves an audience that is more professional and the posts published are work-related. You will find companies, brands, experts, HR, employees, Sales heads, Employers, Self-employed people, Entrepreneurs, and so on.
It’s a place where people look for jobs, and try to capitalize through display of their skills and achievements.
You will find both organic content and curated, product pages, LinkedIn Live plus, and LinkedIn advertisements. Therefore, this platform works on B2B connections, so posting your business communication here will be helpful if that is your prerogative.
Unlike Facebook and Instagram that focus on numbers, LinkedIn focuses on the quality of what you have to share. Your communication should encourage your LinkedIn connections to engage with you from the relevant perspective of your business.
Other than those 6 popular social media giants, there is Quora and Reddit, too, which can help you engage with your audience directly, and establish authority, in the process. Forums such as Quora and Reddit are also a great way to discover what your target audience is talking about, which can help you generate more engaging content.
We are a Social Media Marketing Company striving to help you reach your potential customers with the help of a carefully thought out social media marketing strategy. Contact us now to let us help you drive sales!
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