Choosing The Right Social Media Platform For Your Business
Social media is one of the most powerful methods that businesses have to communicate with their audience. Not only can you use it to give updates about your company, but you can also educate your audience, establishing yourself an authority and building confidence in your brand that will encourage people to purchase from you.
Social media marketing should never be a one-way conversation. The whole point of social media marketing is to create a community and engage with your audience. Replying to the comments you receive, reaching out to current and potential customers, and being social in the community is how you build a trusted brand in the digital space. Having an active profile on social media can also help your ads be favoured by these platforms.
Because of the level of work required to maximise results on social media, it’s important to choose one platform to invest your time into perfecting, before moving onto the next.
Who is Your Ideal Customer?
Choosing which platform to dedicate your time to should be largely driven by your target audience.
You might be surprised at the number of businesses who can’t describe their ideal customer in detail. Ideally, you should be able to tell us where they live, what they enjoy, how old they are and what their gender is.
Of course, your customers might vary from this, but having a customer profile is extremely useful.
It helps us formulate a strategy so that we can market to the right people. Without knowing who your customer is you’re going to be shooting in the dark. By creating a target profile, we can figure out where best to advertise your business and the right tone to use in your ad copy.
Put it this way, if you think that your target customers are young men but in reality they are older women, you’re going to be marketing on the wrong platforms. That’s why figuring out your target audience early on will help you to avoid wasting money on a strategy that was never going to work.
Take a few minutes to write down exactly who your target customer is. Get an idea of what they’re like, you might even give that customer a name. Create a character of sorts and then ask yourself, where on the internet is this individual most likely to be?
Once you know your target audience you can start selecting the right platforms and formulating a strategy to lead potential customers down your marketing funnel.
The first platform that most businesses look at is Facebook, with such a large user base it’s fairly safe to assume a sizeable portion of your target audience will use it. Facebook gives marketers access to audience pools that can be larger than those on TV, with very little barriers to entry. You can run ads spending as little as $5 or as much as $5 million. Of course, the amount of people you reach is directly correlated to your ad spend.
Over the years Facebook has caught onto its popularity with marketers, the result of which is that the organic reach of Facebook business pages is now less than 2% of the page fans. This means that in order to get any reach and ensure the content you’re creating is being seen, you need to pay.
The main downside of Facebook is that you have to pay to play, however, if you have budget to invest, and a website to drive people to then it’s a great place for generating awareness, and sales. With their advanced ad products and buying objectives you can use Facebook ads at any stage of the sales cycle.
Instagram is owned by Facebook and is a fantastic place for businesses to advertise if they have a visually attractive business. They also share access to Facebook’s advanced targeting and ads management systems, which makes paid advertising easy and effective to undertake.
There are still significant organic growth opportunities available to businesses on Instagram, the algorithm is constantly changing but consistent and high quality content is still be rewarded.
This means you are still able to get organic reach, if you are prepared to put time and effort into creating high-end engaging content.
To truly succeed on Instagram you will need a solid content strategy, high quality photography and time to engage with the community on the platform.
As of February 2020 Twitter was the 7th largest social media platform in terms of reach, with 5.3 million monthly users, being surpassed by the likes of Snapchat (6.4M) YouTube (15M) and even LinkedIn (5.5M).
While Twitter usage appears to have increased over the past few years it is nowhere near as popular in Australia as it is in the USA where there were 59M active users. With this in mind, unless you are running an international business the user base is most likely not large enough to warrant the large effort and high level engagement required to really succeed on Twitter.
Pinterest is also a highly visual platform, much like Instagram. The added bonus with Pinterest is that often people pin products they wish to buy or links they want to find again. This makes it an ideal platform for e-commerce business and can also help improve your website’s SEO if you have articles or resources people wish to revisit.
A key consideration for Pinterest is that the audience is almost entirely female. If you’re selling a gender specific product, this could be the perfect place for your business to be seen, though it certainly won’t be the right fit for every business.
We often see that jewellery, home design, weddings, and other image-centric companies perform exceptionally well on Pinterest.
However, the user base of Pinterest is still quite low in Australia making it more suited to international/global businesses.
Picking the Most Appropriate Platforms for Your Business
Once you have an idea of your target audience, it’s time to ask which platforms they are using. This should determine where you invest the bulk of your time and effort.
When trying to choose between two platforms a great way to help you decide is to have a play with their ad management tools and set up a fake ad to gauge the volume of your target audience on each platform.
This is a tried and true method we regularly use, it even helped us guide one of our clients when trying to choose between LinkedIn and Facebook.
If you would like to discuss your social media with a member of the team here at Promote Social | Media, book yourself in for a 30 minute chat.