Social media for newbies — Part 1: Choosing Your battlefield
We all know that social media is now an important part of marketing strategies for most business and choosing the right platform to approach potential leads can be tricky, especially for beginners.
Just like anything else, knowing your target customers is the key to success. You need to first answer these four key questions:
- Who are they?
- Which social media platform(s) do they prefer?
- How much time do they spend on social media?
- What do they like to see there?
Once you have the answer to all these questions, it’s time to start with the real deal.
The Leverage New Age Media blog has released an infographic about the major social media networks and updates it every six months. I find it as the most useful to start with:
Instead of choosing several platforms and find yourself later struggling to adapt to all of them, I would suggest choosing just a few of them that offer the best potential for reaching your ideal audience and monitor them closely.
- With the largest number of active users, Facebook is always a good option, no matter what you do. And because a Facebook post can hold up to 63.206 characters, which is much longer than a Tweet, conversations on Facebook can go much deeper and hence it is more useful for communicating with followers. Facebook ads are also a recommended feature for promoting your page, website or offer.
- Described as a business oriented social networking site, Linkedin is the only platform where the majority of active users are 35 or older. It is a recommended network to get recognized in a professional community where you can post long form content on your domain of expertise.
- Because conversations on Twitter are fast and public, it is the ideal platform for businesses that have things to say frequently and prefer to reach people directly as well as broadly. Note: with around 9100 tweets happen every second, you should always add relevant topic hashtags in order to make your messages visible to your target customers or audience.
- Instagram is, in short, the visual version of Twitter, and a great place for promoting visually appealing content about lifestyle, design, fashion, beauty, etc or the behind-the-scenes side of your company and drive traffic to e-commerce.
- If your brand is all about design, craft/diy, healthcare, fashion, cooking, etc and your target group is female, Pinterest is the best platform to drive traffic to your blog. You can also build connection with experts in your field easily by commenting on people’s boards, sharing or pinning boards.
- Google+ is indeed not as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but with the number of over 300 million active users you should not completely ignore it. Google+ is “armed” with a lot of cool functions that will bring great benefits for your business if used correctly like Google+ Collection, Hangouts On Air, Community, Circles, etc. In addition to that, being active on Google+ might be good for your brand’s SEO as it was built by the most used search engine world wide.
- Currently, Snapchat is the fastest-growing network with more than 100 million active users and more than 400 million snaps a day. If your target audience is less than 35 years of age, then it is worth giving it a try. That said, there is a growing base of active users aged 35 and above who use Snapchat regularly. It is said to be great for teasers, short form promotional video content, holding contests, etc but there haven’t been many firms that received measurable results on Snapchat.
- Being known as the second largest search engine in the world with over 1 billion users and over 400 hours of video uploaded per minute, Youtube is arguably the best platform for sharing tutorials and creative video content. As it is has been proven to bring great benefits for beauty, fashion and gaming industry, it should be useful for other businesses also.
In conclusion, social media strategy is not all about marketing, it is about communicating with people and showing the human side of your business. Your goal to be on social media should not be broadcasting. You want to represent your business with both friendliness and professionalism, let them know that you are an expert in your field and you’re happy to interact. If done correctly, you will not only reach your target audience on social media, but they will also become your loyal followers and happy customers.
