What Social Media Platforms Are Right For My Business?
We are all connected. The modern age of social media has completely revolutionized the way in which businesses engage with their customers—and, in turn, how the consumer is able to interact with their favourite brands.
Social media apps can be installed onto phones and tablets in less time than it takes to boil a kettle. And, since we are rarely without a smart device of some kind throughout the day, the potential to open communication lines between business and customer can be as simple as an upward swipe of the finger.
With a veritable banquet of platforms out there, it can be a challenge to work out which one is the best fit for your business.
What targeted audience are you hoping to engage with? What’s your demographic? These are all important things to consider when taking the plunge into the ever-evolving world of social media.
Demographics
Right, good idea. Let’s drill down into some basics. What is demographic data, and why should I care about it?
In simple terms, demographic data is the collection of statistical information that, when used correctly, can help gauge the success or failure of a product or service. Most often, these analytics feature some common markers: age, gender and professional or social status.
Social media demographics can be an effective way of creating a marketing identity for your business, while also helping you understand the specific makeup of your client base. Marketing strategies can be formulated on the basis that you better understand your audience, and, just as importantly, advise you in which direction to transmit your carefully-crafted content. Based on demographic data, your marketing material can be tailored to strike chords with your target consumer.
So, the next question. What social media platform is right for your business? Let’s take a look at some of the biggest players.
While Instagram seems best suited for lifestyle and visual brands, who can use the platform like a gallery to exhibit their products and services, in truth, ANY business can create a successful and effective Instagram page.
Instagram is a great way for businesses to share engaging visual content with their customer base. Images and short videos can be uploaded onto your feed in seconds, giving companies the ability to create dynamic, relatable content.
With a full armory of filters and features at your disposal on Instagram Stories, you’re never short of ways to connect with your customers. Polls and question stickers, for example, can be an invaluable, almost instantaneous market research tool.
The use of relevant hashtags is a smart way of boosting your presence in your industry, while affixing posts with locations or geo-tags is an effective method of improving your local discoverability.
While its reputation has taken somewhat of a kicking in recent years, with more than 1 billion active daily users, Facebook still remains the go-to platform for customer/business connectivity. With such a colossal user base, there’s simply no better way to engage with a target audience.
Facebook is a hugely versatile platform for businesses and can host all manner of marketing content to suit a variety of consumer needs. Informal posts, infographics, engaging images, behind-the-scenes videos; a medium the Facebook algorithm seems to get quite giddy over. All life is here.
If it’s punchy, rapid, micro-content you’re looking for, Twitter is the perfect platform. With the speed at which interest and trends shift on the social networking site, it’s a great place to share industry news and on-the-pulse updates. Timelines move quickly, tweets disappear into the ether, so it’s important you use your 280 characters wisely. Concise, neatly-structured information dumps make for the best shareable content.
Twitter can be an invaluable tool for developing brand awareness and engaging directly with customers—and for customers to interact with you! It’s a space in which businesses can cultivate relatable contact points that users feel they can engage with. Plenty of global firms have looked to humanize their online persona in the last decade or so, and Twitter can be a great launch pad for this kind of brand growth.
Upload images, snappy tweets, infographics—or short, auto-loading videos to capture the attention of timeline scrollers. Also, through Twitter’s popularization of hashtags, companies can make sure their tweets reach out into the platform’s sprawling hivemind. A popular hashtag will connect your brand to a larger audience.
As well as being a superb networking tool for professionals, one that has completely transformed the way we look for jobs and companies hire staff, LinkedIn is also a handy platform for sharing business-related content.
While users don’t generally fire up LinkedIn for their entertainment or social media fixes, it is a valuable space in which to discover the inner workings of an industry, somewhere to get insider tips and advice, and maximise career opportunities.
There’s plenty of opportunity for customers to engage with businesses on the networking site, as companies have the ability to promote their unique brand with a well-crafted business page.
LinkedIn’s primary function might be aimed at the individual, a platform for expanding professional networks, but there’s enough scope for businesses to share absorbing content. Whether it’s unique industry insights, case studies, work-related missives; anything that might appeal to the working professionals demographic.
Finally...
If your company needs help navigating the potentially turbulent waters of social media strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Whatever the platform, let the Sonder digital marketing team formulate a smooth-running, effective campaign that’ll work for you and your business.
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Posted by Jack Turner on July 12th 2021
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