There are a few things you’ll want to take into consideration when choosing the best social media platforms for business.
Keep reading to find out more about how to find the best platforms for you, as well as what kind of benefits each platform can offer. Get social today with these tips and tricks.
1. Look at Your Target Audience
Before determining your social media marketing plan, you’ll want to take a close look at your target demographic. Consider different aspects of your audience’s profile, such as their age, gender, interests, and values to create a buyer persona. This will allow you to build profiles that appeal to your customer by using the platforms they are more active on.
These online platforms allow you to engage with audience members, with the potential to turn them into loyal customers. Creating a marketing or buyer persona right away will allow you to craft messages that will appeal to a potential customer. To find out more about your customers, check out the demographics of your site visitors.
You can do this by conducting customer surveys, or simply looking at your Google Analytics. After establishing a customer persona, you can then establish the voice and tone that your brand will use to market on social media. Your brand personality will come through with your social voice, but these tones may vary slightly across platforms.
Social media is meant to be less formal, and more humanizing than traditional marketing. Make sure you keep this in mind when developing your company voice.
2. Figure out What Platforms Your Target Audience Uses
Once you’ve done the work to analyze your customer demographics and created a buyer persona, it’s time to figure out where this kind of person is active in the social media world. There are a few tools you can use to determine this.
Tools like Buzzsumo can help you figure out where the content in your industry is most popular. This will help you see what type of platform marketing is working for those in your industry, helping you to form your own marketing plan. You can also conduct some research to find the overlap between your target audience and social network demographics.
Doing some competitor research on social media is a great way to see what works for your product type and industry. If a competitor is getting tons of traffic on certain platforms, there is a high probability that they have cracked the code on how to create effective content.
While doing your competitor research, make sure you brainstorm on ways you can stand out. Do something different than your competition to stay ahead of the game.
3. Audience and Content
You will also want to consider what kind of content will best connect to your target audience, as well as what will best showcase your product. Different social platforms will help you share certain content types.
For example, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr are all image-based companies, great for those with visual marketing content needs. Platforms like YouTube and Vimeo will be best for promotional video content.
You may find that your audience and content type could be spread over multiple platforms. While managing multiple platforms may seem like a lot of work, it could provide a key way to grow your customer base and brand awareness. Using a social media scheduling tool can help you schedule out multiple postings on multiple platforms at once so that you can plan ahead.
While it may be wisest to use a few social media platforms to reach your audience, don’t cast too far a net. Only focus on the platforms your audience is actually using to make sure you’re making the most of your marketing efforts.
4. Choose Platforms That Will Allow You to Build a Community
Now that you have selected your social media platforms based on your audience and content type, you will want to figure out how you can create value for your followers. Giving your followers some value will allow you to build a loyal following and social community around your brand. It’s important to note that the only way to keep a steady, growing following is to post consistently.
Make sure that the information your sharing via social media content varies to keep audiences engaged. Share informational blog posts, iconographics, videos, quotes, and tips along with your promotional content to build brand loyalty through authenticity. Amusing and entertaining content is most sharable, allowing you to get your brand in front of more audience members.
Humanize your brand by sharing your brand’s story, sharing behind the scenes videos, or introducing your staff members. This allows your customers to connect with your company, your team, and your mission.
5. Measure Your Success
With social media constantly changing, it’s best to track your efforts, calculate your success, and experiment along the way.
Collecting data about your social media performance can help you to track patterns. It can also help you understand areas that need some tweaking. Routinely check your performance routines and analytics to optimize your social media platforms.
Make the Most of the Best Social Media Platforms for Business
As you can see, the best social media platforms for business will vary depending on your company, your customer, and your content type. Make sure that you take the above steps to find the best social media platforms for your business.
Are you looking for expert assistance with your social media marketing? Contact me today to get started.