Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Brand

Social media today is a key tool that most businesses recognize can drive leads and sales. Getting social media right, on the other hand, is where most falter. The idea that there are millions of potential customers makes it exciting to want to jump into social media yet most businesses that do fall flat on their faces. No engagement, no readership, poor traction, zero ranking, etc.

These are all outcomes business owners are familiar with when it comes to social media. Why aren’t the millions of people on social media engaging with your content? Why are you unable to generate a single lead even though you’ve been publishing content on a regular basis?

Besides the quality of content you are publishing, the second most important reason is whether you are on the right social media platform in the first place. Here we analyze four things you should consider when choosing a social media platform.

Brand Affinity

Brand affinity is the potential your brand has to resonate with a certain social media platform. Every brand has a personality, just like every person does. Your brand’s personality must mirror the social media platform that you want to use. For example, if your brand personality is young and hip, then Snapchat or Instagram may be the suitable choice for you.

If your brand is mature and sober, then you may benefit from going with LinkedIn. Identifying and matching your brand personality to a social media platform will help you know which platform to use. This brings us to the next point, audience.

Audience

Which audience are you tying to reach? Are they millennials or baby boomers? Do they spend most of their time on social media or do they check in once a day? What is their demographic composition? Aligning these factors with the audience you are trying to reach is key to unlocking real engagement.

Brands like Adidas and Nike have multiple campaigns across different social media platforms each targeting different audiences. Take some time to see how they do it and you will have a clearer picture of how they use targeting to maximize their marketing efforts.

Reach

Reach refers to the number of people you want to impact with your messaging. Some social media platforms, like Facebook, are built for cultivating relatively small but intimate communities. Because of the amount of information that is exchanged, you cannot expect to build a massive community on Facebook and still maintain a level of inclusivity and intimacy.

Twitter on the other hand is built for massive communities. As most people follow brands just for one-way interactions, you can build a massive following on Twitter without hurting the community effect.

Marketing and Advertising Potential

Lastly, you are probably looking for a social media platform because you want more leads. While most brands are on social media just because, you must focus on the potential it has to generate new leads for you. Each social media platform offers different marketing and advertising potentials.

Facebook is great for boosted posts and other organic/paid hybrid marketing methods. Twitter works well for more traditional methods while LinkedIn responds to things like sponsored posts and traditional ads. Depending on what messaging and approach you want to undertake, each will offer you different capabilities.

As a rule of thumb, we recommend that you start with only one social media platform. Moreover, that one social media platform should be Facebook. With a massive userbase and a diverse demographic, this will give you the best start to your social media marketing efforts.

Also, you do not have to advance to the rest of the social media platforms. If Facebook works well for you, keep on building on it. There are successful brands that only maintain a presence on one social media platform and enjoy massive success on it.

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