Choosing the Right Social Platforms
Regardless of what you sell, there’s a strong chance the vast majority of your audience is active on social media. Internet users have an average of 6.6 social media accounts, meaning the odds are in your favour for targeting your customers!
Choosing the right platform to engage with your customers is important, as a one size fits all approach to social media marketing doesn’t work as well as it used to. To avoid being wasteful of time and resources you should analyse your audience to seek out which platforms they use and only target them where it matters.
Identify your audience
There are number of questions you need to ask and answer prior to deciding what platform to share your content on:
- Who is your typical customer?
- What age is your audience?
- What are their interests outside of your product and service?
Different customer demographics can be found more prominently on different social media platforms. Similarly, you need to choose which content best suits the platform i.e., what will perform well or resonate with that audience.
Below are some of the main social media networks which are typically used by brands around the world:
The largest of all social media platforms with over 2.7 billion users. Facebook is a great tool for B2C brands to engage with customers around the world. While Facebook continues to be popular among the general population, it has become a more difficult place to reach the younger demographic.
Facebook is also a popular social media platform for paid advertising, which is prevalent throughout both the app and website.
Twitter is a short-form content platform with a large userbase among a wide range of ages, which works great for sharing real-time updates, news, videos and images to the world. While sharing of content is very common through retweets, your engagement can be easily be buried in a sea of other Tweets.
The platform can also be used as a customer service / enquiry tool to quickly answer questions and provide assistance.
Owned by Meta (previously Facebook), Instagram is a photo and video sharing application popular with a younger demographic. While this platform can work for most B2C businesses, it works really well for visual-based businesses, such as art, food and retail.
Instagram has made many changes to app and algorithm over the past 2 years to keep users engaged, focusing more on the video side of things. Marketers often upload content created for TikTok to Instagram.
LinkedIn is great marketing tool for B2B organisations, with a large number of users among ages 30-49. Like all platforms, they’ve been making an effort to shift users towards creating video content recently, meaning organisations have been switching their style from long-form written articles to short-form video.
LinkedIn is unique in that it primarily serves as a professional networking platform, unlike the others which are mostly made up of personal accounts, making it ideal for lead generation for B2B organisations.
TikTok
Currently the fastest growing social network platform. TikTok is a short-form video sharing platform which is popular with a younger audience. Much like Instagram, TikTok is a visual platform which works great for B2C content.
Reddit is social news aggregation, content rating and discussion website. Made up of smaller communities, it can be difficult to organically market on the platform without annoying users.
Paid advertising is becoming increasingly more common on the platform. This is especially due to the app becoming more picture and video-based over the past number of years.
Are you preparing to alter your customer engagement strategy in 2023? If so, contact us today on +353 1 8041298, or click on the link below to be brought to our contact form.
