How To Find The Best Social Media Platforms For Marketing Your Business

Many companies know how posting on social media platforms can help them grow to reach new audiences. Social media is a very powerful tool and when used effectively, it can massively improve the success of your company.

However, with the range of available platforms, how do you as a business choose the right ones for you to focus your attention on?

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google plus… 

Every social media platform has different benefits and features to aid your business.

From the mood board style of Pinterest to the professional posting of LinkedIn, knowing what platforms will be effective for your business and how to use them is imperative for your success.

Shape the Market offer aid and assistance in managing your online presence. If you feel this is for you, let us know and contact us!

In this article, we will help you focus your social media management strategy. We will give you the information to decide what social media platforms will work best for your company and provide you with the biggest ROI.

Do you talk to people with a blindfold on?

Of course not, so why should you do it on social media?

For you to know what social media platforms will work best for your business, you first need to understand your audience.

As a business, you offer a product or service that will be used by a certain type of person when they require it.

For example:

If you are a moving company who is looking to identify who their audience is, you can ask certain questions. Like, who is your typical customer? The answer would be someone who is moving house and looking to move their belongings.

Other questions you could ask depending on your business are:

How old is your customer? What gender do they identify as? Do you know their income and education level? How about their job? What are their interests and hobbies?

But why do you need this information, what’s the point?

Having answers to these questions will help you identify who your audience is. As such, this will then help you narrow down your search for your ideal social media platform.

When you look at the statistics of different social media platforms, you will be able to see where your audience is. Pinterest has over 70 million users with 80% of them being female.

If you are a company that is focused on selling women’s products exclusively, Pinterest has a majority for your demographic.

Whereas Twitter has over 600 million users. This platform has no specific gender. But, if news and current affairs are part of your target audience’s hobbies and interests, then this platform is for you.

Being mindful of your audience and what trends they follow on social media will help you decide which platforms to market on.

How do you conduct your own experiment to predict who your audience is?

Being able to identify your audience can be more difficult than it sounds. Because of this, there are a few tests and experiments that you can run to help you identify who your audience is and what they are looking for.

Assuming you have an audience built up, you will already have some details from them. These can be details such as their location, age, and gender.

With an existing customer base, you can find out some other vital information through a questionnaire. This can entail questions about why they chose your company as well as general questions about age.

Also, this will give you an overall idea of who your audience is. And, more importantly, which different social media platforms you should be using to attract this audience to your business.

You may also have an email series running. With emails, you can send out two different types of emails to your client base. Each email can differ in style or in what it is pushing your followers to purchase.

If you send out the emails to two different halves of your email subscriber list, you will have a clear understanding of what your audience is interested in and what they will respond to.

As well as this, you could also run a survey to focus groups with individuals who you are aiming your products or services at. You can find out what social media platform they use and what they are looking for

These tests and experiments will help you understand your audience and what social media platforms are best to target.

If you are a company targeting businesses, the best platform for you to use is Linkedin. With 600 million users with an average age of 30-49, Linkedin is the best platform for you to develop B2B relationships.

Despite this article is about finding the right social media platforms for your business, you must know where you are heading.

Whether it is the golden sands of the Caribbean, or just simply looking for greater exposure, a goal must be in mind for what you are looking to gain from posting to these social media platforms.

There are a few different goals that you can establish. From increasing brand recognition to developing relationships. Or, offering support to your customers on social media.

Whatever your goals are, it is important to know these before deciding what social media platform to use.

For example, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are most commonly used by large companies to respond to customer questions and act as a help center. One of these companies includes Netflix.

This frees up phone lines and helps your company better manage multiple customer queries at once. Knowing how you want to use social media platforms for your business is vital to know when choosing your platforms.

Now you have your audience established and your goals defined, it is time to decide which social media platform works best for your business.

First, you will look at the average age of your customers and find which social media platforms correspond best. Following this, you will look at which social media platforms will best help you achieve your goals.

Here at Shape the Market, we utilize all platforms. If you want help managing such an effort, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Below is a guide to help you understand what social media platforms are best to use for your company.

If you think about it, Facebook is like a fridge. Every few minutes you keep opening and closing it to see if there’s anything good.

However, for your business, you won’t be feasting on leftovers. Facebook has over 1.3 billion users, with the largest number of users worldwide. As such, having the largest number of people on the platforms means that there are already plenty of companies using this social media platform to reach their customers.

To stand out, you need to remember how people use Facebook. They keep in touch with old friends and build new relationships.

Therefore, Facebook is good to help build relationships with your customers.

Improving your relationships will increase loyalty with your audience as well. However, the problem with this is that it is hard to reach new audiences on this platform.

With the number of companies and businesses posting on Facebook, it can be hard enough to get your current followers and friends to see your content, let alone people who are not familiar with your brand.

To overcome this, make sure that you are posting content to Facebook that you are sure your followers will engage with. This will help your content appear higher after a few different people have liked, commented, or shared.

What’s more, to get new people to follow your Facebook account, you need to put calls to action in other places. On emails and your website is the best place for you to bring in new Facebook users.

Facebook helps you keep in touch with your existing followers no matter what their age or gender. However, if you are looking to attract new leads with social media, Facebook is not the route for you.

There is nothing worse than being ignored when you are desperate to be recognized.

Twitter can help your business combat this and grow in terms of awareness. If you are looking to get noticed and be seen, Twitter is the right platform to use.

Using the hashtags feature created by Twitter, you can push your posts right into the center of current world events and affairs. You can find individuals who share your views or have an interest in your company.

As well as this, Twitter is used often by news outlets to receive information about what is happening around the world at different times. The constantly changing popular hashtags on Twitter are a benefit and a downfall of the platform.

It is near impossible to plan effective content for Twitter. You have to keep up to date with current affairs. Also, the constantly changing popular hashtags help ensure that what you are posting is effective.

If you don’t know, Pinterest acts as a mood board to inspire its users. Users can pin different content and save it to their own boards. Because of this, Pinterest acts differently to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Instead of liking, commenting, and sharing, the primary goal for users on Pinterest is to find posts that they like and save it for themselves. Some of the most popular pins are recipes, style ideas, photographs, crafts, DIYs, and interior design.

Because of this, being a visually-based platform, you need to understand what images you should use as part of your posts. Pinterest can lead to an increase in revenue when businesses learn how to use it successfully.

It has a population of 1 billion and recognition by the international community.

No, this isn’t China or India.

This is Instagram.

Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in the market, especially for the young audience. With an added 26.9 million users in early 2020, this platform relies on images and videos to spark conversations and comments.

This platform is visually based with the best types of content being art, food, beauty, pets, and inspirational content. Because this platform has the youngest audience range, if you are aiming at a younger demographic, this is the best platform for you.

As well as this, Instagram is also good to help you find new leads. Having similar hashtags functions to Twitter, this social media platform can help you reach new people with the posts you make.

However, this platform tends to be less involved with current affairs and sticks to general topics of interest for their hashtags. As such, make sure you test a variety of hashtags for your business. Instagram is one of the best platforms for you to do this.

Despite the idea that the older generation is out of touch with technology, Linkedin is the most used platform by older audiences.

Linkedin works best for businesses looking to sell their products or services to other companies. Therefore, it is best used to expand a person or company’s professional network.

Because of this, when posting on Linkedin, users want to see posts made by people and not by businesses. If they can see that people are making posts and messaging them, they are more likely to respond and engage with your business.

Ultimately, Linkedin is the best platform to use if you are looking to grow your network and work with other businesses.

It’s predominantly populated by the old and the male. No, this is not the American congress. It’s Google Plus.

This platform has an older male demographic and is best used by businesses operating in software, engineering, and design spaces.

What’s more, it is important to remember that because this platform is linked to Google, it can heavily help you gain website traffic.

The biggest advantage of posting on Google Plus is the fact that your posts will act as a form of search engine optimization. Posting here will show google you are an active company and increase the number of people visiting your website.

Try not to bombard this platform with too many posts and only post every couple of days. It is easy to get carried away with posting multiple times a day to increase your search engine ranking. You will find this loses you followers, as people get tired of your bombardment of posts.

Ultimately, by being selective in how you use social media you can create an effective strategy for increasing exposure.

By utilizing a tailored effort, you can effectively grow your base. Do you want help doing this? At Shape the Market we offer such a service.

If you found this article useful, please share it on your social media platforms to let other people know about which platforms they can use for their audiences.