How to Determine What Social Media Platform You Should Be Targeting

Many businesses quickly become overwhelmed when they begin building social media campaigns. At the dawn of social media, there really was only Facebook. Today, there is Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to name a few. There are a plethora to choose from and trying to run effective, functional campaigns on all of them is just not possible for most businesses. The good news is that you do not want to be on every social media. Not only does this spread your resources thin, your audience is not going to be on every social media platform.

Buy how do you know which platform or platforms you should be targeting? Understanding that while the demographics of users do overlap from media to media, you are more likely to find your audience on one or two, rather than on all of them is a good place to start. Your second step is to understand the media themselves and then to understand your business and your audience.

Social Media and Their Purposes

What is each social media “for” in terms of your business?

• Facebook – Building loyalty to your brand, creating and maintaining your reputation, and creating authority by producing and posting informative content.
• Twitter – Up to the second updates, quick news, promotion of new products, promoting content, holding contests, and receiving immediate feedback.
• Pinterest – Building your authority by sharing content that you have created, allows you to showcase products.
• YouTube – Gives your business a human face, allows you to create informational videos
• Instagram – Provides a platform for posting pictures of your company, it’s goings-on, your products or services
• LinkedIn – Connecting with other businesses, building your brand authority, showing off your knowledge about relevant topics

Which one or two of these social media best fits your needs and your brand’s goals? While, again, their purposes do overlap, it is important to take a look at how the average consumer uses the social media that you are considering, so you can decide whether or not you are going to fit in on that platform. For example, an online clothing store wouldn’t want to use LinkedIn as its primary source of social media, they would want to use Instagram to showcase their pieces and Twitter to get the written-word out about sales and promotions.

Finding Your Target Audience

Social media is where your target audience hangs out online. It’s their “home base”, as it were. Even if it is not their homepage when they open their browser, it is where a large part of your consumers spend most of their time online. This makes it the perfect venue for reaching out to the people that you want to connect with. You just have to find their neighborhood. Do they prefer Facebook? Do they prefer Twitter? It’s important to keep in mind that the average user is going to change over time.

When Facebook was first developed, it was inhabited solely by college students. When it was opened as a network beyond just students enrolled at universities, it was quickly taken over by younger users. It has now swung to be more popular among older users. The average age of the Facebook user, for example, is in between twenty-five and forty-five years old, which is actually quite high for your average social media. Of that population, 60% are female and 40% are male.

Twitter, on the other hand, has very different demographics. The gender of its users is split firmly in half, and the average user is in between eighteen and twenty-nine years old. Pinterest has one of the most interesting gender splits: 80% of its users are female, while only 20% are male, and the average user is between eighteen and thirty-five years old. If you were looking for a young mother of three, where is she most likely to be found? On Pinterest.

Doing this kind of demographic research and then comparing it to your target audience and those demographics is the best way to narrow down your social media options.

Time Commitment

The final aspect of social media you should consider is how much time you have to devote to the creation and maintenance of your social media profile. What does that mean? It means that there is a big difference between how you interact with your followers on Pinterest than how you interact with them on Twitter. On Twitter, they expect prompt, personal responses to questions that are tweeted directly at you brand. This makes it a good forum for brands that have ample time to devote to their social media campaign.

On the other hand, however, Pinterest (though it does have a messaging function) does very little to foster communication between a brand and average user, and is therefore perhaps a better choice for the brand that cannot spend all day responding to tweets.

Facebook is, of course, the reigning king of all social media, with the most total users and the most active users. It is a good place to start for just about every brand, especially those with a local focus. But, like Twitter, it does require a certain amount of time, in order to properly use the platform (curating and creating posts) and interacting with the people that interact with you.

Bottom Line

You shouldn’t feel as though you have to join and use every single platform. In fact, you should be choosing only one, two, or three platforms that really work for you and devoting your time and attention to those. Don’t spread your social media budget and time thin. Pick only the ones that really work for you and pick the ones that really showcase what your company is about/what you want customers to think about when they see your company.