Finding the best social media platforms for your brand or business in the present era is undoubtedly a cluttered and confusing journey. As there are many social media platforms to choose from, one probably gets overwhelmed by choice or drowns in the set of responsibilities each platform demands. If you keep wondering whether or not your business should be on Facebook or whether or not having a Pinterest account is worthwhile, it is essential for you to take a step back and analyze your overall Social Media Marketing strategy for a while. Before you put in a significant amount of effort that won’t do you any good, it is imperative to focus well on the platforms that shall connect to your target audience, drive engagement levels, and boost revenue for your brand or business. It is not mandatory to be present on every social media platform. Your ultimate goal should be choosing what works well for your audience and team members. Let us now make ourselves familiar with a few aspects using which you can choose the best social media platforms for your business, which, in turn, shall help nurture relationships with authenticity and convert when it’s time to sell your products and services.
- Know & Understand Your Target Audience
The very first question for which you need to have an adequate answer is who all form a part of your target audience, along with the social media platforms they use. For instance, if your potential customers spend most of their time on Instagram, then setting up an account on LinkedIn won’t help you much in reaching out to your target audience. Kindly note that accurately defining and describing your potential customers shall help you pinpoint the platforms on which they spend their maximum time online. In this scenario, what you can conveniently do is utilize your already existing customer personas as a starting point and make the most out of their social media profiles to take your strategy to the next level. Remember, the more detailed, the better.
You may ask yourself:
- Which social media platforms do my potential customers use?
- How old are my potential customers?
- Who are the people or brands my potential customers follow on such platforms?
- What type of content do they interact with and like?
- What languages, hashtags, or emojis do they use?
For finding precise answers to these questions, try focusing on your real-life customer profiles and pay due attention to how they communicate with others online.
- Find the Social Media Platforms Aligning with Your Business
The next step involves focusing on your brand or business values and your specific industry. It is essential to note in this aspect that not all social media platforms would align well with your brand, its values, industry type, and the content type your target audience expects. Let us have a better understanding of the same by taking an example – if you own a B2C e-commerce beauty brand, then you can use the visual interfaces of Pinterest and Instagram to exhibit your products and services. Doing so shall help you attract the right set of females and provide you with much greater freedom in the context of content creation. Furthermore, needless to say, Instagram and Pinterest have many user-friendly features and functionalities, including website linking, product pricing, and product tagging.
You may ask yourself:
- Are my offerings (products or services) conducive to visually-driven social media platforms?
- Am I B2B or B2C?
- Does my brand or business create sufficient visual and creative content regularly?
- Are there any non-mainstream social media platforms where I could reach out to my target audience in a better way?
- Evaluate Your Already Existing Traffic Sources
If you own a well-established brand or business, your traffic report can prove to be exceedingly beneficial in determining the social media platforms that are already performing well for your products and services. For instance, if you think having a Pinterest account would do good for your business, but LinkedIn is already generating far more conversions and traffic, you may either consider establishing a new presence over there or increasing the frequency of your posts.
You may ask yourself:
- Which social media networks bring in the most traffic to my business website?
- Which social media networks drive the most conversions?
- What is the traffic pattern on every social media platform that I use – like do Twitter users spend more time on my website than LinkedIn users?
- Explore Your Competitors in the Market
Another step that plays an integral role in this aspect is looking at your competition. You need to determine the social media platforms that your competitors are using and analyze the performance of their overall social media marketing strategies. If some social media platforms aren’t doing well for your competitors in the industry, you should avoid investing your resources there. By performing this simple step, you can have the most valuable insights and save many expensive mistakes for your business and team members.
You may ask yourself:
- Which social media networks are my competitors in the industry using?
- Which social media networks are delivering them the most engagement levels?
- What type of content on every social media platform is giving them the best results?
- What is their posting frequency?
- Who are the people following them on different social media platforms? Is it the target audience that I had in mind?