With so many different social media platforms available, it can be tough choosing the right ones for your business. Should you stick with those you know and use personally? Or branch out and use the major players because ‘everyone else is’?
As social media managers, our focus is on helping to connect your business with your customers by growing your digital presence. We don’t use every platform ourselves, and neither do we recommend our you do either. Instead, we look at each business individually and make informed decisions on which platforms suit your business best. Let’s have a look at a quick run through of how we do this.
Choosing Social Media Platforms for Your Business
Social media provides businesses with an effective and low-cost way to reach your target audience. However, the level of success you receive can vary depending upon which social media platforms you select and what you use them for. Here’s a quick look at some of the questions to consider when picking platforms for your business:
- What platforms are your target audience using, plus when and how often are they using them?
- What are your business’ social media goals?
- How much time do you have to dedicate to social media, or will you be outsourcing this?
- What types of content will you be sharing?
- What platforms are your competitors using?
Next comes the decision about which platforms to use. That requires you to learn more about what your options are. In New Zealand, the main social media platforms are what we call the Big Five: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn. Each offer a different ‘service’ to their users, which in turn is reflected upon the types of people that use each one.
- Facebook remains the most popular platform with all age groups, with more women than men users, popular in urban rather than rural areas and favoured by those under 65 years.
- Instagram users are interested in highly visual posts of products, people and locations. Very popular with those aged below 30, with women being the key users.
- Pinterest provides great opportunities to showcase products and provide helpful information. Mostly used by women with higher incomes and aged younger than 50 years.
- Twitter is very popular overseas, but not so much in the local New Zealand market. Many businesses who also sell overseas do have Twitter profiles because of this.
- LinkedIn is aimed at B2B (Business to Business), which makes it highly suitable for businesses which sell products or services to other businesses. It’s very like Facebook in that each post can have a photo, text and external link.
- YouTube is great for sharing videos. YouTube is a very popular platform for both entertainment and educational purposes. It is also perfect as a hub for uploading your videos, which you can then link to from your website.
It does take considerable time and effort to use social media effectively. We offer our social media services to help create a bespoke marketing plan for your business which can include setting up your platforms, creating a content calendar, managing your social media for you and creating reports to track your business’ social media progress.
Get in touch today and let’s chat over coffee (even virtually) and get your social media humming.