When it comes to figuring out the best social media for your business, we know that you are faced with a plethora of options to choose from. The first step is to ask yourself what your goals are. Is it expanding your reach? Is it generating more leads? Is it about brand awareness? From there, you can determine which platform will give you the right exposure to the audiences you want to reach.
Is your brand very visual? Would platforms like Instagram or TikTok Locket Widget work for you? Is it focused on real-time events and can you run with trends? So, would Twitter work? Or, as in the case of a lot of brands, do you have a diverse audience that needs a combination of platforms by combining YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn?
If you are wondering what to choose and how, let’s dive into the social media networks to find out!
Define Your Social Media Goals
So, we have mentioned this, but let’s delve into it more. There are many benefits to using social media, but you need to know what you want to achieve before you start. When you have defined goals, you can take the step of creating a successful social media strategy for your business.
Look at the social platforms and see if they align with your brand. You don’t want to be spending resources on platforms that won’t give you a good ROI.
The goals that you set will not only help you determine which social platform you choose but also the content you create. It will also help you map out your target audience and know when and how you will be creating campaigns.
It will also help with certain other aspects including:
- Improving your customer service offerings;
- Identifying new leads and prospects ;
- Reaching out to new audiences;
- Increasing your brand awareness;
- Learning about the needs, wants, and habits of your audience and customers and;
- Increasing traffic to your site and boosting sales.
Determine What Channels Your Audience Uses
Now that you have your goals in place, it is time to look at what your customer wants and needs. You want to have as large of a reach as possible. So, it’s not advisable to choose a platform where your audience isn’t present.
It is a good idea to analyze which platforms your audience prefers and what they are more active on and reach them from there. Don’t expect them to come to you.
For example, if you want to build a presence on TikTok, you need to ask yourself who is the target audience for TikTok and go from there. Start by conducting some audience research to define a buyer persona. With this, you will know who you are targeting with the basics such as gender, demographics, interests, etc.
But, that will only go so far, so actually find out and ask them which platforms they are using and what their interests are. You can also use the platforms to cut out that initial conversation.
Paid advertising allows you to target audiences and actually establish the size of the audience. You can also use analytics to determine who your audience is and what they are doing.
Map Out the Type of Content You Create
Have a look at your content. Different types of content will work better with different platforms. Instagram and TikTok are more visual. If you don’t create videos constantly, then it is probably not for you.
You will also need to create and distribute content that actually matches your brand.
Look at your campaigns, your audience, and your content to make the final call. Consider the following types of content that need to go out:
- Blog posts. Business blogs are great to be shared over platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Podcasts. Consider Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, aside from the audio channels.
- Testimonials. Get these up across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
- User-generated content. This is the holy grail of content and can be shared on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
- Webinars and live streams. Again, this is good for visual platforms.
- Ebooks. Put these up on your site same as blogs and share similarly.
- Videos. The ultimate content, you can post these to almost all of your social channels.
- Images. Again, these are versatile for almost every channel.
The Bottom Line
Look at your channels as an experiment. If you are just starting out, think about it like trying out each platform to see which converts more. But, spend some time on each. Building up an audience and content takes time. It also takes time to start seeing results. But, you can monitor the success rate of each platform and decide from there whether it is worth your ROI.