It’s critical to carefully analyze which social media outlets to use when marketing your company, goods, or content on social media. Making a hasty decision to use whatever apps you use personally—or attempting to advertise your company on any platform—can result in a waste of money and time with poor results.
To ensure that you’re selecting the right social media applications for your business, it’s best to approach the decision strategically. In this article, we’ll go through the questions you can ask before deciding on the right social media sites for your business. Then, to help you choose the right platform—and get started with social media marketing—we’ll give you some detail about seven common platforms and social media marketing services here.)
How to Choose the Most Appropriate Social Media for Your Business
There are some factors to weigh when making an educated decision about where to target your social media marketing activities. Begin by addressing the six questions below.
What Social Media Applications are Used for the Target Audience?
It’s important to concentrate your social media activities on the platforms where your target audience consumes the most time. If you’re marketing a product to people 65 and over, for example, you probably won’t bother with social media apps like Twitter or Reddit because very few people in that age range use them. Instead, concentrate on the applications they do use, which are mainly Facebook and YouTube.
You can select the best-fit apps for your main demographic using the demographic details in the review section below, or you can ask your current consumers what social media apps they use the most. To collect this information from visits to the website, an established social media profile, or an email newsletter, use a survey app.
Is the app Tailored to the Kind of Content You Produce?
Instagram and Pinterest are mostly image-based platforms. YouTube is mostly concerned with video material. These sites aren’t for you if you mostly create text-based content and rely on stock images.
You’ll be best off concentrating on text-focused platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit unless you want to hire artists or videographers to build these tools for your social media efforts—or unless you want to learn how to do these items yourself.
If your company creates a lot of picture or video content (commercial property, tourism, etc.), you’ll actually have more luck with the more interactive social media applications.
Where are the Competitors Concentrating Their Efforts?
If your rivals are having success with a certain social media app, you may as well try it out as well. In the other hand, if your rivals are ignoring a certain app, there might be an opening for you to take advantage of the underserved segment.
Since most businesses have links to their social media accounts on their websites, gathering information on where the rivals are concentrating their social media activities should be easy. It’s also a smart idea to go to their social networking accounts to make sure they’re up to date; a social media page that’s barely used shouldn’t be called an aggressive endeavour.
What is each Platform’s Organic Scope Likely to be?
With a few exceptions, thriving on social media necessitates having a large number of fans or subscribers. Google indexes YouTube videos, Reddit threads, Twitter Tweets, LinkedIn Articles, and Pinterest Pins, allowing users to find them via a general Google quest.
Person posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, on the other hand, are not indexed by Google, meaning the only way to get them in front of an audience is to either publish them with your network or ask someone to share them.
Furthermore, except with those who follow you, the algorithms used for these sites will have a significant effect on whether or not your posts are viewed. For example, in early 2018, Facebook changed its algorithm to favour posts from friends and relatives, and as a result, many brands’ organic presence on the site plummeted.
What Types of Promotional Opportunities are Available on Each Platform?
If you’re able to spend money on advertising, a low organic presence isn’t really an obstacle. Each social media app provides promotional options, but some are more comprehensive than others. Apps like Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, have large databases that allow you to target advertising to a very targeted audience. Sponsorship options are often available on popular YouTube channels.
How Much Time Will you Devote on Social Media on a Regular Basis?
Many companies make the error of attempting to build a profile on any social media app when they first start out in social media marketing. The issue: Maintaining numerous social media pages is time-consuming, and unmaintained profiles will reflect negatively on your business.
Focusing on one or two platforms—no more than you can realistically keep up with—is a smarter strategy. This will free up more time and energy for you to focus on growing your following on those platforms and engaging with those that follow and associate with your business.
A social media monitoring tool can be useful if you expect to post often on several pages. These apps allow you to generate a large number of social media posts in one sitting and arrange them for publication on all major social media sites at particular times.
Conclusion
The first question you can ask yourself when assessing social media sites for your company is, “Does my target audience invest time using this app?” You’ll lose time and money marketing your material, goods, and company on that platform if your viewer doesn’t use it. (Find social media marketing services here.)
The second thing to consider is, “Can this app assist me in achieving my objectives?” If you want to increase the amount of traffic to your website without spending any money, you can use an app like Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or Reddit. If you’re willing to spend money on advertising, Facebook will help you attract the largest possible audience.
If you want to raise your company’s or products’ exposure and popularity, Instagram and/or YouTube may be the way to go. After you’ve narrowed down your options based on viewer and target requirements, ask yourself, “Do I have the time and money to regularly produce content for this channel?” If you answered yes to this question and are confident that your target audience invests time on the channel you choose, your social media marketing activities will undoubtedly aid you in meeting your company objectives.