“Different social media platforms cater to different audiences, which prompt companies to choose the right platform for their best marketing effort.”
Choosing the best social media channel is a crucial task to ensure the successfulness of your social media marketing. However, it is not an easy task. The number of social media available for you might be overwhelming. Some of the considerations for picking a social media platform include the target audience, their niche, your marketing strategy, and your competitor’s chosen social media. Below are the strategies to help you choose your social media platform.
Identify Your Target Audience
There are many social media platforms which offer different features. The platforms have different users, depending on multiple factors. Age, gender, economy, and social standings are some of the prominent factors that influence a user’s chosen social media.
Detailing your list of the audience will help you in choosing the social media platform for your social media marketing. Utilize your customer personas and extend these personas to their online social profiles. You can also conduct market research to further identify your target audience in detail. These questions might help you determine your target audience:
· What is their age?
· Are they male/female?
· What type of content do they interact with?
· What type of business do they follow?
Elaborate your social media strategy objectives
What do you expect from your social media strategy? Answering this question will help you determine your social media choice. A strategy will work better or worse in a platform, depending on the platform’s users and features.
If you expect an increase in brand awareness, you should aim for social media with a large user base and wide coverage. Do not use social media that aim for a niche audience since it will not gain you many new audiences. Social media such as Facebook and Instagram are great for increasing brand awareness and ROI generation.
If you aim for lead generation, use a social media that is great in collecting data from its users. LinkedIn is a know frontliner in lead generation for its discussion system and advanced search.
Pay attention to the channels
Different channels cater to a different set of users. One way to find out what channel your audience is using is by doing social listening. Social listening means monitoring your brand’s social media channel to look for any mentions, discussions, and feedbacks regarding your brands and products. Those user-generated information are then analyzed to gain advantage. There are many social listening tools that offer you different features, some of the best known are Hootsuite, Social Mention, and Sprout Social. Another way to understand your target market is by conducting survey/market research. A survey can help you understand current trends and topics. Online survey tools such as SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Form will help you understand your demographic of choice.
Analyze your competitors
What channels are your competitors using?
Check your competitor’s choice of channels. Doing this will help you understand the state of the industry’s activity. Some channels are more flocked by particular industry than the others. You can determine whether they thrive in their business and whether you should try to compete with them in the same platform. By analyzing your competitor’s choice, you may get valuable insights that will help your own marketing strategy.
What channels are delivering the most engagement for them?
You can analyze how active they are and how do their audiences respond to it. Engagement is a very important metric to consider in social media marketing. You can also discern their content and analyze which content works best in a platform.
What content on each channel drives the most engagement for them?
Different channels have different audience. One type of content can make people engage in one social media but the same content can be useless in another social media. You can use social listening tool to analyze your competitor’s engagement rate.
How often are they posting?
You have to keep track of your competitors’ posting rate and when they are posting. Usually, business accounts will post contents in the prime time (after work time, at night). Look at how often your competitors post their contents and see whether the quantity of the post improve their engagement rate.
Balance the number of your channel
Social media marketing efforts should aim to create a balance of social media channel management. Too few channels mean reduced brand visibility and reach, while too much channels mean spreading yourself too thinly and reducing your the impact of your effort. Fun fact: 91% of retail brands utilize two or more social media channels.
Using automation software helps in managing multiple social media channels. An automation software can schedule posting and cross-post the same content to multiple channels. Although you can manage a large number of channel using automation software, it is important to start small. Find the channels that fit your content the most, then experiment with other channels to see how they compare.
Select your channel from the data we have collected
To help you start choosing your preferred channel, we have compiled some pros and cons of the most influential social media nowadays:
Main contents:
- High-quality images and videos.
- Instagram Story – Quick videos about personalized stories.
- IGTV – High-quality vertical video, can be longer than Instagram Story.
- IG Live – Live video.
Usage Statistics:
- Over 1 billion active users.
- High engagement from women (39%) compared to men (30%).
- High engagement with teens (63%).
- Regular usage by Millennial (34%).
Pros:
- Millennial most popular social media network among.
- Ideal for highly-visual and immersive content.
- Ideal for video-heavy companies
- Easy to reach new and target customer via hashtags, follower list, direct message, and tagging.
Cons:
- Instagram’s new algorithm reduces its organic reach.
- Costly to produce visual content consistently.
Main contents:
- Specifically chosen contents for your Facebook audience.
Usage Statistics:
- 1.49 billion daily active users.
- Over 68% of U.S. adults use Facebook. 51% of them visit multiple times per day.
- Highest engagement rate among college graduates (77%).
- Particularly popular in India, Brazil, and Indonesia.
- Among Facebook’s younger user-base (34 and under), 19% of them are male, and 12% are female.
Pros
- The largest audience in social media competition (1.59+ billion users).
- Offers complete features.
- Great reporting options.
Cons
- Organic reach has plummeted in recent years.
- Too much noise, potentially hindering your way to your target market.
Main contents:
- Images that pertain to female audiences, especially related to fashion, beauty, food, lifestyle or travel.
Usage Statistics:
- 50% of Millennials use Pinterest every single month.
- Over 250 million people use Pinterest each month.
- 80% of new signups come from outside of the United States.
- 40% of pinners have a household income of over 100,000 per year.
- Of the 50% of millennials who use Pinterest, 50% of them have a household income of $75,000 or more.
- 22% of Gen Z (12 to 17 yr-olds) see Pinterest as a channel for “old people.”
- 98% of pinners seek out to find the ideas they find discover on Pinterest.
Pros:
- Easier to connect with strangers due to the network’s focus on sharing with like-minded people and businesses.
- A pin’s half-life is 3.5 months compared to a tweet’s 24-minute half-life, and a Facebook post’s 90-minute half-life.
- Using hyperlinked pins makes it easy to drive traffic to your site.
- Users can follow all your boards or just specific ones.
- Typically higher conversion rates.
Cons:
- Copyright issues make it hard to re-pin the content of other users.
- The network attracts a niche user.
- Requires a high number of daily pins to see results.
Main contents:
- News link related to your brand or industry
- Company blog posts
- GIFs to add personality to your feed
Twitter Usage Statistics:
- Has 100 million active daily users.
- 80% of Twitter usage occurs on mobile.
- 12% of Americans use Twitter as their primary news source.
- 25% of U.S. male adults use Twitter, compared to 24% of female adults.
- 32% of users have college graduate degrees
Pros:
- Effective for social customer service.
- Ideal for website content promotion, quick thoughts, and quotes.
Cons:
- Too much noise, potentially hindering your way to your target market.
- Stagnant growth on the network.
- Limited character length limits communication.
Main contents:
- Company news, professional resources, articles, and job postings.
Usage Statistics:
- 63% members are between the ages of 25-54.
- Comprised of 50% female and 50% male users.
- Finance and medical are the two largest industries on LinkedIn.
- 43% of LinkedIn members currently hold a decision-making role.
- LinkedIn counts over 1.8 million groups.
Pros:
- The optimal network to reach professionals.
- Not cluttered with noise.
- Opportunities to communicate directly with users on forums.
Cons:
- Users are not the most active of users.
- Spam is prominent.
#YouTube
Main contents:
- High-quality, long-form video
Usage Statistics:
- 1.8 billion monthly users.
- 70% of traffic occurs via mobile.
- YouTube reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.
- An average session on YouTube lasts 40 minutes.
- 85% of teens (13-17) use YouTube.
Pros:
- The second-largest search engine after Google.
- Content can be up-cycled to be used on other channels.
- Videos easily going viral.
- YouTube videos are prioritized in Google search.
Cons:
- Demands quality, long-form video, which can be costly and time-consuming to create.
- Difficult to reach users directly.
Conclusion
Identifying your abilities and goals will help you choosing the best platform for your digital marketing endeavors. Have you considered all of the factors above? After you’ve selected your channels, it’s time to get started on planning, creating and publishing your content.
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References
https://skedsocial.com/blog/social-media-channels-for-your-business/
https://promorepublic.com/en/blog/10-ways-find-audience-social-media/