Of course with the increasing population of people and increasing sales features incorporated in social media platform these days, every business is adopting social media marketing as one if its strongest marketing strategies.

Even businesses with no physical stores and websites are thriving and gaining recognition and prestige in the digital world.

Some social media networks are focused on making a smooth and swift buy and sell environment for both the businesses and the customers and some others are focused on getting information out there.

An example is the business shop feature incorporated into Facebook and Instagram making it very easy for businesses to organize all their products in one page and have prospects visit these social media shops.

Digitalization has of course become the word on the street. Buying and selling online has been made very easy, or has it?

Starting a business on social media sounds effortless, some people just assume that as long as what they sell is tangible and enticing, they’d gain recognition, a bunch of followings and engagements immediately.

But obviously when they start they see it isn’t just a day’s job of sitting with a cup of wine and posting one picture that would go viral immediately and create such a buzz.

STARTING UP YOUR BUSINESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

A well organized and planned social media approach always works better than random social media activities. Your strategy should inform all the activities that you plan to run for your business on social networks.

Of course you have to start by stating what you want to achieve on social media; your business goals and branding objectives and align social media towards achieving these goals.

Then you have to make a decision on which platform to use for your business. This is the start of putting your plans into actions. This is where social media and strategizing starts for you.

THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN CHOOSING THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Of course you can’t be active on every social media platform. When making a choice, it is very important to narrow down your choices to a select few platforms which will allow you to focus your efforts and get the best return on your time investment.

You need to choose a platform or two that best suits your type of business goals and will get you your best traffic.

Below are key things to consider and evaluate before choosing a social media for your business;

1. YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

You need to identify your ideal audience and determine what channel they are using. You wouldn’t want to grow your business on a platform where your users aren’t active.

You’d want to be as specific as possible. You should answer the following questions;

• Who is your typical audience?
• How old are they?
• What is their income and education level?
• What are they interested in outside your product, like hobbies?

These specifics will help you figure out what platform most of your prospects live on social media.

2. DEFINE YOUR BUSINESS GOALS AND OBJECTIVES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

It is important to state what you want to achieve with social media. Your goals play an important role in the platform you choose and the type of content you create, the audience you target and more.

Each platform hosts a different type of audience, you’d have to pay attention to the gender and age ranges of those you are trying to target.

TYPE OF CONTENT YOU WANT TO CREATE

Different types of content work better with different types of social media. Instagram for example works better with pictures and videos.

The type of content you create will depend on a different number of things, your industry, your brand and your target audience.

FACEBOOK

Statistic;

Facebook is by far the largest social media platform there is right now. It has approximately 1.73 billion visits from active users daily.

The network is populated with 54% females and 46% males.

88% of online users between the ages of 18-29 are on Facebook.

82% of online seniors aged 65+ are on Facebook and 72% of them are between the ages of 50-64.

In terms of audience demographics, Facebook covers most of the ages and it is worldwide.  

Contents that best fit;

Videos perform better than all other types of Facebook posts. Inspirational, funny and practical content generates the most engagement.

Long texts do not generally perform well on Facebook, so if you decide to use text based contents, you should keep it short and simple. Users here tend to have short attention span and would prefer to read something quickly and be done with it.

Combining images and short texts have shown to be the best way to gain user engagement.

So long infographics generally will not be a good idea on Facebook.

Objective/Goals;

Facebook is great for lead generation, building relationships and interacting with prospects to offer customer support. Its advertising platform can be highly customized to target very specific audience based on age, employment, interests, location, interest and other characteristics.

YOUTUBE

Statistics;

YouTube is the second largest social media platform. With about 2 billion active users a month and 300,000 TV paying subscribers.

90% of 18-24years old use YouTube. 87% of 30-49 year olds use YouTube. 62% of YouTube users are males.

YouTube should always be an option for all businesses in general. Google has incorporated YouTube videos in its search results and this gives business a very great opportunity to get found and create brand awareness.

For one, videos are more engaging and video marketing has been on the rise with lots of businesses incorporating it into their marketing strategies and YouTube as we know it is a home of videos.

For tips on getting started on YouTube read our article on “HOW TO GROW YOUR BRAND ON YOUTUBE – BEGINNER’S GUIDE”

INSTAGRAM

Statistics;

Instagram has about 500 million daily active users.

43% of females and 31% of males use Instagram. Most percentage of its users range from 18-40.

Content;

Instagram is a visual heavy platform. High quality photos and short video clips thrive more on the platform.

Instagram allows you to grow your follower base organically through the use of storytelling in high quality videos and images and using rich relevant hashtags.

TWITTER

Statistics;

Twitter has about 145 million daily active users.

63% of all active users are between the ages of 35-65.

Content:

Short textual contents tend to thrive most on Twitter.

It is known for providing real-time news update. It is usually used by news outlets.

Twitter is your go to platform if you want to reach out to followers with breaking news, announcements, important messages and other moment information. It generally is used by businesses for immediacy.

Twitter allows you share videos, photos and textual content, but ultimately, text-based contents are the best type of content for Twitter, they bring about the most engagement.

Images perform better on the platform than videos.

LINKEDIN

Statistics;

The network receives about 303 million active users monthly. More of its users are between the ages of 30-49, lesser of under 30s.

Content;

It is great for B2B businesses (Business to Business). LinkedIn is more for a professional audience. It creates a great platform for other businesses and professionals to find your business page.

This platform is great for editorial content and it helps with gaining authority as a brand and engaging leads through conversations.

PINTEREST

90% of pinterest users are there to purchase. Pinterest is like an ocean of beautiful looking images and photos from all around the world. It is a graphics heavy platform. These images can lead to websites, blogs, videos, services and products.

The platform is filled with heavy décor, wedding, fashion, art and design images.

More so, a very high percentage of image results on Google are of pinterest origin.

If your business is image based like photography, it would be great to leverage pinterest.

Pinterest is currently dominated by females, but there is an increasing number of males trooping in.

REDDIT

Reddit is one of the most underutilized social networks in social media marketing strategy. It is currently ahead of Twitter and LinkedIn in daily traffic.

It is a social news aggregation, web content rating and discussion website.

Registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts and images which are then upvoted or downvoted.

The contents with the most votes are pushed to the top of the feeds.

Because its primary focus is on news aggregation.  Communities that have built themselves on Reddit often use the platform as an internet forum.

More so, Google features Reddit articles in its search results.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Social media marketing is certainly an ideal way to reach your target audience and get your products right in front of them.

But not all social media networks work for all kinds of businesses. And you certainly can’t be on all of them, posting the exact same content on all of them.

Think of what your business is about, what you want to do with social media and the kinds of content you plan to create. Study each social media platform through extensive research, study your competition as well to see what platforms they thrive most on.  With the social media platform best suited for your business, you’re well on your way.