Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business

By Nabila Athaya
May 30, 2022
7 min read

Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business

Social media has progressed from a novel concept for connecting with friends and showing off photos to a game-changing marketing necessity for meeting your audience right where they’re at.

Identifying the proper social media channels and types of content will enhance your social media marketing plan, cultivating loyal brand advocates, and driving more traffic to your website. Though most businesses recognize the importance of creating a social media content plan, it can be overwhelming, and you may be unsure where to begin.

Here are 3 essential social media marketing tips to boost your digital marketing plan with organic social media:

1. Define Your Target Audience

The first step is to identify your target audience. Details about these individuals should be based on actual audience data within the social platforms and industry market research.

Compile your audience information

First, you must understand who your audience is. Then, to market effectively to your audience, you must also understand how old they are, where they live, and how they engage with your business & other online channels.

While gathering this information may appear daunting, customer relationship management tools like Zoho CRM, PipeDrive and HubSpot CRM can store and sort this data, making it simple to uncover insights. Furthermore, audience research tools like Sparktoro will help you research your target audience’s online behaviour – especially if you don’t have customers yet.

Understanding and organizing your audience can help you get your message in front of the right people at the right time and effectively meet your marketing objectives.

Use social media metrics.

Most social platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, include an analytics feature for business profiles that can tell you information about your followers, such as when they post, where they post, and other interests. This information on top-performing posts is vital to determine the right time to schedule posts, where to post, and what types of content get engagement.

Examine your competition

Doing a competitive analysis of your competition’s activity will help you figure out how to communicate with your target audience. You can analyze your competitor’s strategy and cherry-pick the best pieces for your strategy.

See what’s working for them, and learn from their mistakes. But always be aware that copying your competitors will never set you apart. You can also look for additional inspiration outside of your industry and see what else you can learn from brands that use social media well.

2. Align Your Social Media and Content Marketing Strategies

Your social media strategy and website content marketing strategy should not be mutually exclusive. Both are content-focused and aim to spread the word about your product, brand, etc.

If you want to make your marketing efforts count, you should align your social media and content marketing strategies to be in sync. We get more work done together than apart! 🙂

While almost every brand has a presence on Facebook and Instagram, there are numerous other social media platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok. You probably don’t have the resources to be present on every social media platform (nor should you), so how do you prioritize?

It’s best to select social media platforms that are appropriate for your company’s target audience and that you can excel at. Here’s the breakdown of each platform and which industries are the most active on each:

Facebook offers quality video streaming, like live video, and a high-functioning messaging platform that allows brands to interact with their followers one-on-one. Based on research by SocialBakers; Sports, Fashion, Retail Food, FMCG, and entertainment are the top five industries where Facebook advertising works best. In addition, recent marketing case studies show that these areas have the most followers and people interacting with brands.

Instagram is great if your brand is the least bit visual. It supports more visually compelling posts and creative short videos. The Sellfy reports that Fashion, Beauty, Health, and Parenting are the fastest growing niches. Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. It has evolved into a potent marketing tool.

YouTube (which is owned by Google) is the second most popular search engine after Google Search, and it’s best for longer informational or entertaining video content. It’s very effective in reaching a large audience, especially with “How-to” content. Some of the most popular categories on the platform are technology, gaming, product reviews, and digital courses.

Twitter allows users to discover stories about today’s most important news and events. Twitter is best used to increase brand awareness. You can “like” or “retweet” someone who mentions one of your products or services. Alternatively, if a customer complains about your services on Twitter, you can respond in real-time to correct the situation.

LinkedIn is the digital version of a networking event! It enables you to connect with people, generate leads, raise brand awareness, foster business relationships and partnerships, share content, and drive traffic to your website. Sage Exchange reported that the top 5 industries include Information Technology & Services, Hospital & Health Care, Construction, Retail and Education Management.

Snapchat is particularly good for localized campaigns and telling compelling, interactive stories. One of the highlight features is the Snapchat Geofilters. It aids in increasing local audience engagement. When users are in a specific location, brands can create art graphics that appear over Snaps. It is perfect for promoting events or special occasions and getting your audience involved.

TikTok is an all-in-one platform where you will find videos related to anything and everything that has helped brands capitalize on organic virality. The right campaign can bring in super-strong engagement. Different types of videos that have improved and boosted your popularity on TikTok are Social Media Challenges, partnerships with other popular creators, giveaways, and dancing.
It has shown that dancing, music, and playfulness – along with a hashtag encouraging others to join in on the fun, have proven to be the perfect combo for getting people with more extensive, engaged followings to share the campaign organically.

3. Encourage Social Media Engagement

Essentially, social media engagement grows whenever someone interacts with your account. (Remember the good-ole-days of Klout for social scoring?!)

Through social media, you can build customer loyalty by assisting your customers when they are in need, developing a relationship with them, and providing a one-of-a-kind customer experience.

To bolster great social media engagement for your brand, try these best practices in your organic social strategy:

Create Educative, Creative that Inspires Your Audience

Creating content that targets and captivates your chosen audience and then publishing it at the right time and through the proper channels makes it more likely to get maximum engagement opportunities, setting you apart from your competitors’ brands on social media.

Establish A Voice For Your Brand

Have you followed social accounts that are all over the place? For example, does one post sound like it was written by a university professor and the next by a preschooler?

Having a voice and tone guide that includes information about your brand persona, company catchphrases, cultural personality traits, and common vocabulary will keep your brand on point no matter who’s writing your content. (This is especially important when you’re outsourcing content creation.)

Be Relevant & Relatable

Stay attuned to what is happening around you and outside of your company. By creating content relevant to what’s going on in your community or current worldwide events, you show that you’re paying attention to people’s shared experiences. This makes you relatable and encourages engagement.

Summary

When it comes to social media engagement, it’s critical to track the insights. It shows how well the content is received by current and potential customers. This data can be used to optimize future posts or to improve your products and services. It also provides a measurable metric to track progress over time.

Social media moves quickly! New platforms emerge often while others experience full demographic shifts. Your business may go through periods of transition in your social identity too.

With the natural ebb and flow of the social marketing industry, your organic social media strategy should be a living document that should be reviewed and adjusted as often as necessary. Always encourage your team to refer to it frequently to stay on track, but don’t be afraid to change it to reflect new goals, tools, or plans to optimize organic social media reach.

Elevate your Social Media Advertising strategy with Ollo Metrics & chat with one of our experts today!

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We are a Digital Marketing Agency in Vancouver, BC, Canada. We specialize in Google Ads, Social Media Ads, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What makes us different from other agencies is that we place a heavy emphasis on marketing analytics to help connect the dots between marketing costs and revenues generated.