Which social platforms are right for you and your business?
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Square peg, round hole: Which social platforms are right for you and your business?
When you invest money into something, you expect returns.
You study the market, assess the opportunity and decide whether it’s an investment worth making.
Social media works in the same way. Yet, most people invest time and money into creating and publishing content without thinking about – or even expecting – returns. They don’t think about how to make their investment worthwhile. They go all out, creating profiles and keeping pages active on every social platform that’s available. But, if you want your online channels to generate valuable returns on your spend, you need to be as discerning with your choice of platform as you would be with your money.
Start backwards. First, define what you want in return and then decide on a platform that can get you that.
In other words, outline your objectives or KPIs and identify the target audience most appropriate to them. These will help you pick the right platform to smash your goals.
To do any of this, you need understand how each platform works and who it caters to. Here’s a handy guide to understanding the major social networks and their strengths:
Best for: Targeted and paid ad campaigns
Facebook is great to target paid content to a narrow audience, so it’s perfect for businesses that want to push product or service awareness, trials and purchases. It also gives you detailed insights into how well your campaigns are performing, offering brands the opportunity to understand their audiences’ interest, motivation and behaviour well.
Best for: Selling products or services, Influencer marketing
With its inbuilt shop feature and visual-first platform, Instagram is one of the most popular platforms to showcase and sell products or services. It’s also the best channel to leverage influencer partnerships or marketing sponsorships.
领英推荐
Best for: Business networking, Thought leadership, Personal branding
LinkedIn is the unrivalled leader of professional social networks. The LinkedIn algorithm rewards consistency and quality in publishing content. Unlike other popular social networks, engagement is not an end goal, it’s only the tip of the iceberg – building valuable connections, establishing yourself as an industry leader, sharing your professional accomplishments and having your career profile easily available to recruiters or peers makes this platform a powerful tool for career growth.
If you aim to generate leads – whether that’s B2B or B2C sales, industry leadership positions, speaking engagements or industry awards – LinkedIn is where you need to be.
Best for: Catching up with trends, Customer service
If the twitterati are abuzz, you know something big is going on. Twitter is a global stage where you can watch developments in politics, business and entertainment play out, while also voicing your opinions. It offers a unique space to directly address and hold conversations with influential people and celebrities. With Musk’s surprise move on Twitter, we’re eager to see how this platform will evolve. For now, individuals who always have a perceptive opinion or comment will find Twitter an exciting space to be in.
YOUTUBE
Best for: Video content
Education, entertainment, motivation – you can find long- and short-form video content on any topic under the sun on YouTube. Individual users generally aim for monetisation of their videos, so longer-form content works well to meet the channel’s minimum requirement in watching hours.
Businesses have been using YouTube in a variety of ways. Organic content usually includes product demos, education, community building and content marketing. Paid advertising on YouTube is generally more expensive than on other social networks because of the higher multimedia production costs involved.
PODCASTING PLATFORMS
Best for: Community building, Thought leadership
Though the most popular podcasting platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts don’t strictly qualify as social networks, we can’t leave them out of this list because audio is one of the fastest growing and powerful media formats available today. Podcasts are a great way for businesses to establish the calibre of their leadership, and for individuals to network with high-profile guests as well as establish their authority, knowledge & expertise.
Every social platform has a unique approach to content and audience retention, but they only show results if you approach them intelligently. Your success on these platforms will depend not only on your content, but also on your engagement strategy, understanding of the algorithm, and data-backed approach.