How To Find The Perfect Social Media Platform For Your Brand
By
Vivian Michaels
In the modern world, not having a website to represent our brand means throwing money in the trash. This fact has been proven to be true over and over again, as many brands and even smaller businesses that target a local niche have been able to experience a significant boost in their exposure and sales by getting their business on the internet. While a website is now considered an essential part of a successful business, another vital part of being successful on the internet is social media marketing. There are a variety of social networks that have grown into powerful marketing platforms for brands, and utilizing these platforms can be advantageous not only to the engagement and exposure of your brand, but also to help your brand reach new customers, close more sales and, of course, grow its revenue.
The problem, however, is that brands often discover things aren’t as easy as it seems when it comes to social media marketing. There are different social platforms available, and being active on all of these networks can be a time consuming task. It’s also difficult to learn how each of these social media platforms works to help a brand make the most of the tools offered by each. With these problems in mind, it becomes quite obvious that targeting one platform, especially when your brand is still relatively new in general or new to the internet, is a more effective way of utilizing these platforms to grow your business.
Advantages of Starting with One Social Network
According to AdWeek, as much as 88% of companies are now utilizing social media networks to help them grow their business. While some of these companies are able to be successful in growing their business through social networking, others are having a harder time. One major problem amongst those who are having trouble, is using multiple social networks accounts when starting out. Let’s start this post by considering the advantages that your brand may gain from starting out on one particular social network.
- The first and most obvious advantage is the fact that, by focusing on one particular social media platform, your brand has the opportunity to learn the “ins and outs” of that platform and master every tool that is made available to help the brand promote its products and services. One social network would also make a micro-influencer marketing campaign much easier, as you would only have to search for an influencer on the particular channel you are targeting.
- By focusing on one social network, less time will be used jumping from one platform to another. This will also make the campaigns created for that particular social network so much more successful.
- This can also save a brand quite a lot of money. If they’re unable to manage multiple social accounts, they may have to hire someone to help them out, which costs money.
How To Determine The Best Social Network For Your Brand
You’ve decided that you would like to target one social network when you’re getting started. That’s great news, but now the question is, what social network should your brand target? With so many options out there, it can be very difficult to choose the right social network. When you make a random decision, your social media marketing campaigns may end up being unsuccessful and a waste of precious time, which you could’ve spent on another department or strategy, such as a sponsored blog posts campaign, to boost your business.
Thus, you will need to do some important research to help you decide which social network would be the best one to target if you want your social media marketing campaigns to be successful. According to We Are Social, approximately one million new social media accounts are created each day, and the current global social media user count reaches over two billion. Many of these users have accounts on multiple platforms, but some prefer a particular platform over another. Thus, it is important to determine which social network your target audience prefers and to target that particular social platform.
Let’s take a look at a step-by-step guide to help you determine which social media platform you need to target to help your brand grow.
- Digital Marketing Institute recommends first determining the goal of your social media marketing campaign before you decide which network you wish to target. This is an essential step to take. You might want to turn toward social media to simply increase brand awareness, or you may have more specific goals in mind, such as to generate B2B leads or B2C leads.
- You also need to determine which social channels your target audience uses mostly. To determine this, you will need to conduct some research on your existing client base, as well as look at the audience analytics from competitor websites. You do not want to target SnapChat if you target an older audience, for example, as this particular social channel is mostly used by younger individuals.
- When you look for the most appropriate social network for your business, do not only focus on the user count of these networks. For example, Zephoria reports that Facebook has around 1.94 billion active users, while LinkedIn only has around 500 million active users, as reported by Expanded Ramblings. Still, LinkedIn often poses as a far more effective social network for businesses that are targeting other businesses, when compared to Facebook and most of the other social media networks.
- Visit pages and groups created on social media networks by competitor companies and take a look at their engagement. It’s a good idea to take a look at larger brands when conducting this step as it will give you a better idea of the potential of that particular network. If, for example, your competing brand has 5,000 followers on Facebook and almost no engagement, but 50,000 followers on LinkedIn and a lot of mentions, then it means LinkedIn is the more effective platform for our brand.
Final Verdict
Social media networking has become essential in today’s business world, yet many companies still fail to utilize these platforms to the advantage of their brand. One particular problem is the fact that not all networks are meant to be used by all businesses. In this guide, we’ve provided a basic outline of how you can find the best social media channel to target for your brand, which will lead to a more successful campaign and help you increase your brand’s awareness.
