Choosing the best social media platform for a business involves many facets. Utilizing social media to strategically target specific markets and audiences is key to the creation and execution of successful marketing campaigns. The variety of social media types and formats available makes it easy to use social networks to accomplish specific goals and reach across a wide span of targeted demographics.
It’s often best to focus on expanding the reach of each social media network with a particular, focused goal in mind. Trying to tackle too many platforms or manage too many profiles and pages at the same time is often counterproductive and confusing for social media managers and followers alike. It takes more than a little time to develop, implement and manage a successful campaign strategy for a single account, let alone stretching a single individual or campaign over six or seven platforms at the same time.
What Types of Businesses Benefit From Using Social Media?
Almost every business in every industry benefits from adding social media to a new or existing marketing campaigns or strategy. While not all businesses need to communicate with customers or clients, setting up social media profiles on one of the many available platforms is a great way to stay abreast of upcoming and trending industry and trade information.
Whether a business provides a physical service, intellectual service or physical product, it is advantageous to communicate with patrons and customers. Some businesses use social media to offer deals or coupons or to poll consumers about what services they value most. Businesses that sell products especially gain an advantage by creating social media profiles. Retailers, either online or conventional, are able to gather valuable insights into the minds and behaviors of consumers naturally.
Which Platform is Best to Target Which Demographic?
Social media is useful in a variety of ways; businesses often strive to accomplish one or more of these five goals:
- Inform customers and clients
- Engage followers
- Persuade members to purchase a product or service
- Attract new traffic
- Learn about competitors and consumers
There are many social media options available, but some of them are better at attracting and communicating with different target audiences than others, with the exception of Facebook, which is good for just about everything.
- LinkedIn: great for recruiting new employees, but even better for checking out the latest information about the industry and learning what competitors are doing
- Instagram: useful for engaging younger markets; using pictures to market in the moment is a growing trend in the online marketing universe
- Twitter: fantastic for sharing short “blurbs” or increasing traffic (a successful tweet or retweet can attract hundreds – even thousands! – of new followers with minimal effort)
- Google+: beneficial in the tech world, in particular; not as popular as Facebook, but definitely a great platform for sharing information with followers that use it
- Facebook: as mentioned above, an all around good option for diverse marketing needs; extremely helpful in engaging with current customers and attracting new ones
How a business chooses to utilize social media has many impacts on success. A savvy media manager knows how to manage time and schedules posts often and efficiently, and also knows when a social media team needs expansion to cover increased engagement and interactions. Choosing the most appropriate platform to achieve specific goals is the safest – and easiest – way to increase an online presence and prevent the ossification of poor (or nonexistent) marketing practices.
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