How To Choose The Right Social Media Platform For Your Business

With the continuous emergence of new social media platforms, now at close to 200 platforms to choose from, how do you know which platform is right for your business? It can become a very tedious task for brand owners to choose the right platform for their business, but we’re here to help you with some tips.

Should you follow that TikTok trend? Or should you play the long game and harness your efforts on Facebook because that’s where your target audience is at?

The important thing to remember is when you’ve selected the channels you want to pursue, pick one and get it up and running successfully before you open another one. If you try to launch multiple channels at once, your chances of success diminish. A lot. Therefore, it makes sense to stick to your guns!

Start with your audience

If you’ve learnt anything from every marketer’s love-to-hate series, Emily in Paris is that your audience must come first every single time. Emily’s focus is always “What does our audience want?“, not “What do we want to share? Your audience is the most important factor when choosing a social media platform. 

By switching the focus from yourself and your aims, to the people you serve and how you can help them. You can transform passive scrollers into engaged, trusting and loyal community members. 

Focus on them > focus on you.

Emily gets it, do you?

Consider your company

Your products and services, your brand personality, your business type, should all influence your channel selection. Highly visual brands should explore DeviantArt, Pinterest, and Instagram. Whereas, most B2B businesses have LinkedIn at the top of their channel list in order to reach professional clients. The most common platforms for B2C brands are Facebook and Instagram, depending on their target audience, in order to engage with layman Internet users. 

That being said, channel choices aren’t black and white. Many large corporations have a large following on TikTok such as Ryanair or stunning brand presence on Instagram such as Apple. This goes to show that creative operations are still businesses and can benefit from what LinkedIn has to offer. Some channels have broad appeal, such as Instagram, whilst others are more niche, DeviantArt. It’s a case of weighing the odds and seeing what makes most sense for your business and understanding what your company does impacts the options available to you. 

After evaluating your business nature, you should define your social media marketing goals.

Look at your competitors

One of the first steps to conducting any strategy is to conduct competitive analysis. Amongst the many insights this provides, such an analysis provides the following;

It’s useful to know what others are doing in the space, however it isn’t helpful to copy competitors for the sake of it. Make sure you’re making an informed decision before entering into a new social media platform. 

Understand each platform and their uses

Each social media platform has its own personality and its way of communicating. LinkedIn is great for sharing professional expertise whilst Twitter is a good way of staying up to date with trending topics. Snapchat was the first social media platform to introduce disappearing posts but BeReal is equally as ephemeral.

Being Gen Z’s favourite platform, Instagram is a highly focused visually aesthetic platform. Instagram story ads can seamlessly showcase your business to your audience and beyond.

It’s important to learn the difference between each platform and their nuances in order to help align them with your businesses’ marketing strategy.

Align with your overall marketing goals

As mentioned, social media marketing can help your business achieve its goals, however they are platform specific. For example, Twitter and Facebook are better suited to help with customer service than Instagram which would aid better with customer engagement. 

Thus, you should align your marketing goals with your chosen platforms. 

Analyse available resources

Social media management is a commitment. One needs to tend to it, nurture it and grow. It’s important to have a dedicated team managing your social media channels in order for them to run smoothly. 

Hot Tip: Working a month or two in advance ensures you stay ahead of the game and maintain a consistent content flow. It allows you to plan and schedule posts, maintain a steady presence, and avoid falling behind.

While being proactive, it’s important to remain flexible and open to incorporating timely and topical content to keep your social media strategy current and engaging. Balancing preparedness and adaptability ensures you’re well-prepared while still capturing the pulse of trending topics.

If you need help developing and executing social media marketing, feel free to reach out to our team.