Choosing the right social media platforms is crucial in order to market a brand’s work successfully. There are a wide variety of different social platforms, each with their own benefits, that can be chosen from as being most successful for a brand to market themselves on. However, social platforms work on a quality over quantity basis, for example; it is better to have two busy and well-managed channels, rather than having lots of social channels that don’t produce much content.
If there is a business case for using more than one social channel, but you have limited time to post on multiple platforms each day, then a social scheduling tool such as Buffer can be used to automate posting to a number of different channels.
Types of Social Media Platforms
The social platform used depends on various factors including: age, direct/indirect selling, selling to other companies for example. So a business needs to identify the best channel that is going to allow them to effectively reach their target audience(s).
One benefits of using a Facebook business page is that you can increase your exposure to customers. This is because you can reach your target audience much easier through the specific targeting tools. Having a business page on Facebook also potentially helps gather more leads without any expenses – unless you choose to promote content.
Facebook insights give you the opportunity to look at and assess statistics such as the number of likes, the reach of posts and more. Finally, Facebook can help you analyse competitors in your industry to identify any trends.
Linkedin is used for businesses to post about industry news, job adverts, events and more. It is a platform used to connect with likeminded people, working in the same or similar industries. Some people consider it to be the business version of Facebook. Therefore connecting with the right people on this platform is key for extending the reach of your businesses’ posts and creating valuable connections.
Staff should be encouraged to like and share any posts from the businesses page so that the reach of them can be extended to their connections, meaning that more of your target audience will see your posts. Using staff as brand ambassadors can be a really effective way of improving your brand’s social presence.
Linkedin provides paid for analytical tools. These tools tell you information such as who has viewed your profile, how many times your post has appeared in front of your connections and the number of clicks that your post has generated. This means that a business can see who is interested in their work, which will give them more data to help drive more traffic to the website.
Twitter is known to be very good with engagement as it attracts a unique audience and can help make certain audiences easier to pinpoint.
The advantages of Twitter are quite similar to Facebook and Linkedin, in that they all help to reach a wider audience because of the large user base.
“Twitter has 330 million monthly active users” – Hootsuite
However, Twitter allows you to provide a good level of customer service, by being able to respond to your audience quickly. In fact, many brands have gone as far as to set up separate customer service accounts, kept split from the main brand account.
Pinterest is a visual search engine that people can use to gather ideas and inspiration. It is used to upload, save, sort and manage images. There are extensions you can use on your website so that users can click the ‘pin it’ button on images on your site, allowing the user to pin them to a board. Therefore Pinterest can be a great tool in directing traffic back to your website, through the use of imagery.
Finding your audience on Social Media
When finding the correct audience on social media it is important to first think about defining your target audience. Identifying their habits and interests is a good place to start as from there you will be able to narrow down the social platforms that they are most likely to engage with.
Competitor Social Analysis
A great way to decide on what platform to display your business on is by looking at your competitors. Have a look at what platforms they are using, how they are using them, their followers, their content and the type of engagement they have received. This will give you a better understanding of the type of social strategy that will achieve maximum engagement and can benefit your own strategy.
Social Listening
Social listening is when you monitor digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about your business. It is important to keep up to date with social listening because it allows you to stay on top of trends, while also identifying areas of your brand that could be improved. Social listening helps to give the business important insights into what the customers want and what they expect from you a company.
“66% of telco/broadband and retail banking companies said they ‘deeply know’ their customers, less than a quarter of telco/broadband customers and only 41 % of banking customers agreed.” – Hootsuite
