CHOOSING THE RIGHT PLATFORM TO REACH YOUR AUDIENCE
According to a survey by market research firm Statista conducted two years ago, 78 per cent of Hong Kong’s population were active social media users in the third quarter of 2017 – a high but not unsurprising figure given the city is consistently reported as possessing one of the fastest internet connections on the planet.
With these kind of statistics it is not surprising that reaching audiences via the numerous social media channels available has become a larger priority for brands, businesses, organisations and institutions of all shapes and sizes.
In the intervening years since that survey was conducted every year has brought its own set of fresh and diverse changes (from changing algorithms to shifting audience demographics) which have created new and seemingly endless challenges for brands who want to communicate to their audience on these target rich platforms.?
In this article I am going to investigate the basics of what a few of the top platforms deliver, how to use them, and if they work for your brand and your audience (you can investigate other platforms and ranks them against the kind of criteria I am using in this article).
How to Pick the Right Platform for Your Brand
Before I dive into explaining the different platforms and their most popular features (i.e., why your audiences love them), first we need to know where your brand will best fit in.?
When choosing a social platform you need to be clear about:
Facebook has the largest worldwide audience of all social media platforms.?
In Hong Kong alone it is used by over 44% of the population but as it has become more accepted and functional in its users lives, its primary demographic has become older.
Facebook is a great and versatile social media platform as it allows its users to consume, share, like, react and comment on a large variety of content.
Users can write posts of any length, post videos, photos, gifs, stories (content that vanishes after 24 hours), frames, stickers, etc.?
Facebook also has groups for community conversations and messaging features for individual and group audiences.?
An important fact to understand with Facebook is that not every audience uses every feature and you need to understand the demographic of your audience, their behaviour, their physiographics and the features that fit to these factors.
Facebook is great for brands that want a strong local following.?
With company pages they can grow quickly using targeted ads to reach an ideal audience.?
And because Facebook allows for multiple conversation strategies (e-mail subscribe, purchase, learn more, etc., diverse content targeted at their ideal audience tends to perform well.?
Posts with lots of comments tend to rank better.
Images are still the bread-and-butter of Instagram but video on average attracts twice the engagement of photos.
In addition to stories and videos (not to be confused with IGTV), Instagram content is also shoppable (easily executed with Shopify) meaning if someone sees something they like and that brand is set up to sell, the user can swipe right and make a purchase.
Instagram is best for visual brands with visual assets that can be leveraged as candy content to attract users eyeballs.
It works very well for hotel, tourism and travel companies, clothes sellers, make-up brands or advisors, food and beverage brands, trend setters, etc.?
Like on Facebook, posts with lots of engagement (comments) rank best and show up on the feed.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a platform that is increasingly losing the large acceptance and cool factor it once had as its features are no longer that unique as now they can be found on pretty much every social platform out there that has photo sharing capability.?
It is still very popular among some younger (18-25) audiences (and some even younger).?
It allows users to use fun filters, camera features, stories, etc. to exchange ephemeral (read: temporary) messages.?
Users can save content or “discover” content from brands.?
Brands can use this to publish whatever they want…
It’s typically topical or value-added content.?
Snapchat is good for brands who want to connect with millennial audiences using various creative mediums (stories, images, videos, etc.).
YouTube
YouTube is the third most popular social media channel in Hong Kong (after Facebook and WhatsApp) and casts a wide net with a hugely diverse variety of audience members.?
The quality of the video content doesn’t have to be movie studio-quality and because of the nature of the creator built community, audiences are used to watching content of all levels of craft and storytelling.?
The content that performs best on YouTube is instructional or informative (How to videos and explainers being the most watched content).?
The goal for most brands using YouTube is often about SEO and signing up their audience for more information via e-mail or signing up for a service offered by their brand.
The challenge for many brands on YouTube is keeping their audience on their content and not losing them to vast amount of distractions available on the platform where viewers can be lost to another video on a wildly different subject or topic that leads them down a deeper and deeper content rabbit hole that they never return from (because by the time the content surfing ride is over… They can’t remember the first video they were watching or why).
Like YouTube, Twitter has a large variety of global users but it is less relevant as a platform locally in Hong Kong where it only enjoys middling popularity.?
The platform allows videos, images, and posts of 280 characters.?
领英推荐
They also have a stories feature called ‘moments’ that allows the user to create a longer narrative using a series of posts.
Twitter is great for brands that need to reach a lot of audience members in a given niche and that can post frequently.?
The feed moves quickly, so one post every week isn’t going to make much of a dent.?
Twitter is useful for brands in Hong Kong with quick newsworthy stories seeking a more global audience.?
WhatsApp is the second most popular social network platform in Hong Kong.?
WhatsApp is a free mobile app that uses your phone’s internet connection to let you chat with other WhatsApp users, without SMS text message charges.?
The app also lets you share files and images, and supports free voice and video calls.
he best reason to use WhatsApp for a brand is that many of your audience are probably already using it.?
More than 60 billion messages are sent through WhatsApp every single day.
Surprisingly, users of WhatsApp and similar services are willing to engage with businesses.?
According to Nielsen’s Facebook Messaging Survey, 67 percent of mobile messaging app users said they expect to use chat more for communicating with businesses over the next two years.?
What’s more, 53 percent of respondents say they’re more likely to shop with a business they can message directly.
If your audience is young, they’re more likely to be comfortable using messaging apps for their day-to-day communication.?
A study by Pew Research Center shows that 42 percent of smartphone owners between 18 and 29 years old use messaging apps like WhatsApp, compared with only 19 percent of smartphone owners who are 50 or older.
As you probably know because you are already on it reading this article, LinkedIn is the social media platform geared to professionals.?
It enables its users to network and to build their professional portfolio, find a job and to promote B2B products and services through content marketing.?
It is also used by employers and recruiters who are looking for job candidates and brands who want to build their employer brand with their audience.
93% of B2B marketers feel that LinkedIn is?the best place to win leads and 64% of corporate website visits originate on LinkedIn.
That’s a lead generation magnet.
But despite those positive statistics, LinkedIn has largely flown under the radar in terms of finding B2B leads.
According to LinkedIn, businesses that post at least once per month have been shown to gain followers 6X faster than those that don’t.
In addition, Company Pages with at least 150 followers typically get 5X more Company Page views than those with fewer followers!
At APV we aim to post at least once per week to our Company Page to keep our followers engaged (we often post twice per week… Sometimes more).
We’ve found personally that our LinkedIn content performs really well if we include the following:
Conclusion
There are lots of platforms available.
You need to understand how much of your audience is on a platform, how often they use it, how they use it, which content they engage with the most on it and what the perfect mix will be to activate them to take action before setting up a new platform and spending time, effort and lets face it money on it.
Not every brand needs to be on every platform.
If you don’t have an audience on a platform (and your audience is never likely to join that platform) don’t waste time on it just because a brand you like is on there…
Spend your time wisely and reach your audience where it is most effective for you to reach them.
STILL NEED MORE HELP?
Reach out to me and the team at?APV!
We’d love to talk to you about how we can help you understand more about how you can better understand the social media landscape for your brand, business, organisation or institution in 2019!
We can help you create social content that attracts the right attention and delivers ROI for you in 2019!
Thomas J Elliott is the Senior Producer/Director for?APV?an advertising agency specialising in video and animation with offices in Wan Chai Hong Kong.?
He is a winner of numerous international awards for video and animation and the author of five books on visual content.
#SocialMedia #socialmedia #socialplatforms #socialmediaadvice #choosingasocialmediaplatorm #socialmediaforbrands #howtousesocialplatforms #apv #APV #apvasia #APVAsia #thinkingcleverwithcontent #videomarketing #videocontent #videostrategy #videoaaudiencestrategy #videoaudiencetargeting #socialvideo #socialvideostrategy #videoproductionasia #videoproductionhongkong #linkedinpowerprofile #powerprofile2018 #pp2018 #inittogether