When you are starting your new business, you will want to raise brand awareness, increase product knowledge, make customers buy, keep an eye on your competitors or get hands-on feedback. Your social media presence will help you achieve them all. It will help your business grow like wildflowers. But, with new platforms popping up every month, how do you choose the few best social media platform for business?
Or should you create accounts on all? Will it drive more sales if you’re present on all social media platforms? What is the right course of action?
Hold on. This blog will answer all your queries.
There are several points for you to consider before you hit on the create button. Let’s discuss them one by one.
Do businesses need a presence on social media?
The answer can vary depending on many factors. If you can achieve your goals, drive sales, and perform well, then you may get going without it. But if you want to know what customers look for, want to reach out to more potential people, you must use at least one of them.
To understand why businesses need a social media presence, let’s walk you through some recent data –
- According to Statista 2020, more than 3.5 billion active social media users today.
- Lyfemarketing, 2018, indicates that 71% of consumers who had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to suggest it to family and friends.
- 21% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands they can reach on social media.
- 74% of consumers share video content from brands on social media.
- Users spend about 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media platforms every day. (Source: Oberlo)
- 90% of marketers say that social media marketing efforts have increased the exposure of their business, and 75% say they’ve increased traffic. (Source: Buffer)
So, if you want to maintain customer relationships, grow website traffic, encourage engagement, provide excellent customer service, you must use social media for your business.
Now, let’s move on to the next part.
Tips for deciding on the best social media platform for business
Every month there’s a new social media that comes out. Should you create an Instagram account? Connect on LinkedIn? Or stick to Facebook? Which one would bring success to your business? Before deciding on that, you must have a solid social media marketing strategy.
Before choosing the best social media platform for business, take a moment and reflect on the following questions.
What are your business goals?
Define your business goals. Your business goals can possibly be to establish a brand voice, drive traffic to your website, reach out to more community members, or strengthen customer service. You need to figure out how to plan your social media marketing efforts to align them with your business goals.
For instance, if you want to increase brand awareness, you may choose Twitter as your platform. You might track how many people you are reaching out to daily/weekly,/monthly. You can also measure your brand awareness through analytics on the number of people talking about your products or sharing your social media posts.
Suppose your brand’s target audience is people in their late 40s-50s. And one of your objectives is to increase brand engagement. You may choose Facebook as one of your social media platforms.
The Facebook engagement stats state-
- The age group between 35-44 years old gives most monthly post likes.
- The age group of 45-54 years old provides top monthly post comments.
- Vertical videos with description lengths of over 300 characters can raise engagement rates from 0.18% to 0.39%
Source: SocialPilot
Once you’ve identified your top goals, write them down to help you consider your channel choices.
Who is your ideal audience?
Before you plan on the social media strategy, you must determine your target market. In simple words, find the set of individuals who are most likely to buy your product or have an interest in your offer.
Find your target audience in 5 steps:
- Analyze your product or service
- Check out the competition.
- Choose demographics to target ( age, location, gender, income level, education level, occupation, etc.)
- Consider to target based on personality, attitudes, values, interests, lifestyle, behavior.
- Perform research
- Track and evaluate your results
Once you identify your set of audiences, you need to find how active they are in the platform. Know where they are spending their time. Having this data with you will help in deciding on a social media channel for your business.
What are the resources available to you?
If you are to see fruitful results from social media, you need to invest your time and resources. You need to plan your every step from adding creativity, scheduling posts, and keeping up with the latest trends.
If you have a social media team, get them together and strategize the content. If not, then build an all-star social media team. Next, find out if you have enough people to manage content on different channels. Another question you must reflect upon is- do you need a paid tool to manage many platforms, or will you do it manually.
What is your content type?
Have you already created images, videos, how-to guides, infographics, or blogs? Each network shows a particular type of content better. For instance, Pinterest is an image-centered platform that showcases image content better. The network’s primary audience is females, so you need a presence on Pinterest if your audience comprises this demographic.
YouTube must be on your top list if you’re primarily creating video content.
83% of consumers worldwide prefer YouTube to watch video content. (Hubspot)
To sum up, when you are just starting on a new social media, make sure you have the right type of content to post on the right platform consistently.
How are your competitors reaching out to the audience?
In-depth competitor research gives a clear picture of your industry’s top social media channels. What type of content are your competitors posting? Which kind of content do people like more? What are people saying about their product/service? Expectations from the audience, pain points of potential customers, Where do your competitors lack? And many more. You can find the loopholes, correct them and amp up your social media game.
You may hire someone on your team whose sole responsibility would be to keep track of your competitors. Most businesses do something in-between: a quarterly or monthly report.
Whatever level of analysis you choose to perform, the analytics will be invaluable to your business.
Wrapping Up
The number of social media platforms is overwhelming. There are over 15 social media platforms for you to choose from. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you must create accounts in each of them for your business. What matters most is connecting and engaging consistently with the right audience on the right social media platform.
Ask yourself the five questions explained above before deciding the best social media platform for your business.
Still, have a question about developing your own social media strategy?