With so many popular social media marketing platforms out there, it’s a confusing time for any marketing person when it comes to social media. From Flickr to Facebook, Tumblr to Twitter, you feel like you should be exploring the potential of all of them, but you’re not sure where to find the time. When the list of ways you can engage with your audience seems to be growing continuously, how do you decide where to spend that precious time of yours?
Don’t do it for the sake of it
A trap businesses often fall into is being active on a social media platform just because it’s there, and they feel they should. You hear that Snapchat’s the next big thing so you immediately sign the business up and start sharing, but you don’t get any response from your activity. Unfortunately, in the world of social media, not all activity is going to get a response. How your customers want to interact with you and where they hang out online is going to depend on them, your industry, and their relationship with your brand and brands like yours. It’ll also depend on what type of content you’re sharing, and what you want to get from each platform. For example, if you’re a consumer website that sells phone accessories, you’re likely to get some action on Facebook, but not so much from LinkedIn.
That was a bit of a generalisation, and there are unfortunately no rules as to which social media platforms work best for which businesses. The only way to really latch on to what works for you and your business is…
Test, gather results, adjust
While we just warned against social media activity for the sake of activity, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t rule out dipping your toe in the waters of various platforms. It doesn’t cost anything to sign up for an account, after all, and it shouldn’t take too long to put together and schedule a couple of posts. Once you’ve been posting for a specified period of time, you can then look at the engagement (or lack of) and make an informed decision about whether this platform is right for you. It might be that you abandon it completely, or you might dial down the activity and focus more effort on another channel.
While you can get some solid data to work from with trying out various social media platforms, don’t underestimate the power of good old-fashioned market research.
Conduct a survey
A simple but effective answer to the question “how do I know which social media platforms my customers use most?” is to ask them. A customer survey may be an old-school tactic, but it delivers in terms of getting some useful feedback from your market. You can conduct a customer survey in a way that suits you – that might be sending via email, getting your salespeople to ask questions over the phone, or embedding sharing a link to a survey using a tool like Typeform or Google Forms (which is free). However you do it, make sure to ask your customer base which social media platforms they use most, what kind of content they like to read and share, and where they would prefer or be most likely to interact with you.
Have a look at what your competitors are doing
This may seem a bit of an obvious one, but worth noting nonetheless. Is one of your competitors absolutely killing it on Facebook? It might be worth a go then. But, bear in mind, if they are already occupying a particular space on a particular platform, in order to really compete with them, you’re going to need to bring something a little different to the party. Are there any gaps in their activity or content you can fill? Can you engage in a bit of light-hearted banter with them? Can you hone in on a particular niche of the same market? Once you’ve got an idea of which platforms and content are bringing you competitors success, you can be opportunistic and adjust your strategy accordingly.
The key thing to remember is that no matter what the next big thing in social media is, jumping on the bandwagon is going to show results for every business. Deciding where to spend your precious time and hard-earned money is key when it comes to social media.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.