How to Choose the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business Growth
Social media platforms have matured. This means two things for businesses:
- They have a lot to benefit by taking their marketing to social media.
- The complexity of social media has increased, which is tough to manage for businesses.
Horses for Courses – Understand Which Social Media Platform Is Best Aligned to your Marketing Goals
Social media success depends on the choice of platforms, and your choice of platform should be made based on your business marketing goals. Here’s a quick look at what’s unique about some of the most talked-about social media platforms.
- Facebook: Majorly used for social interactions
- LinkedIn: More Professional and Business Interactions
- Twitter: Trends, Announcements, and Opinions
- Instagram: Images, Banners, Posters, Infographics
- Periscope: Live video to connect with audiences in real-time
Facebook – The Big Daddy of Social Media?
Should my business be on Facebook? The answer is a resounding YES. The numbers and visibility advantage with Facebook is so pronounced, you just can’t ignore it. Let’s evaluate the most popular social media platform on some important parameters, and see how you can determine what suits your business the most.
Here are key points to help you evaluate Facebook’s suitability as a social media marketing platform for your business.
- High Visibility: Facebook leads the social media market in terms of number of active users; there’s the advantage of high visibility here.
- Big Data: Facebook has so much data about users, that you can use tools and services to optimize your advertisements for highly targeted audiences.
- Cost: Note that Facebook’s organic reach has been declining, and you’d soon need to use one or the other paid Facebook service to get significant results.
- Competition: The existing competition is intense, because the platform’s been there for long now, and most brands are already present here.
- Flexibility: Text, Images, GIFs, Videos, URLs, infographics – you name the content format, and Facebook allows you to use it.
- Complexity: Marketers tend to agree that Facebook has too many tools for , segmenting, and targeting audiences. Sometimes, it’s just too complicated for a businessman to manage the information.
- Usability: Chances are you have a personal Facebook account, or have used one previously. No wonders, so many people find it enjoyable to operate business profiles on Facebook, because they’re comfortable with the platform.
- Niche: Facebook doesn’t really have a niche; all sorts of businesses can leverage its reach to get more leads, create brand equity, spread branding messages, build links, and get more sales.
See how we applied several tests, and evaluated Facebook’s suitability as a social media platform. Using these parameters, here are some takeaways.
Takeaways
- You’d understand how Snapchat and Periscope would rank highly in terms of low existing competition, and Instagram would appeal to entrepreneurs who can invest in creating visually appealing digital marketing collateral.
- Pinterest, because of its niche as a visual content focused platform with primarily female audience, appeals to businesses in industries like travel and tourism, food, and fashion.
- LinkedIn has its niche in the business, corporate, professional and job sphere, which makes it ideal as a social media marketing platform for B2B businesses.
- YouTube helps you deliver high-value video content to educate audiences, and to help them understand your products better.
With this reality, one thing’s certain – you can’t invest equal time and effort on all social media platforms. Focus on one or two, and keep the ball rolling on the others, to achieve the best results from your multichannel social media marketing plan.
Author Bio:
Kuldeep Bisht is an Inbound Marketing Consultant. He has over 8 years of digital marketing experience. Throughout his career, he has helped many enterprise clients and local small businesses improve their marketing results by using strategic thinking and proven methodologies. You can connect with him on Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
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