Are You Choosing the Right Social Media Platform to Reach Your Audience?

Are you using social media platforms to build your brand? If yes, then have you analyzed which one works effectively and meets your goals?

You hardly get time to use every social media outlet out there for your business. No one would like to waste time on a platform that does not give returns over a period of time. It's better to research and narrow down the list to a few social media platforms that give better and quality results for your business.

Here we discuss which social media channels could be useful for your business.
Marketing agencies and other businesses realize the importance of using social media for respective businesses. The data given below can help you understand why it is a crucial time to build a social media strategy to boom your business.

• It was calculated that 90% of U.S. businesses were using social media for marketing purposes. The source projected the rate would increase from 86.2% in 2013 to 91% in 2019.
• Daily active social media members worldwide amount to 3.5 billion, which is 45% of the population across the world.
• 73% of marketers believe that social media is somewhat effective or very effective for their business.
• 71% of consumers who have a positive experience with businesses are more likely to recommend them to their connections.

Once you make up your mind to use social media channels for your business, here are some steps that you can follow to identify the right fit.

Research Your Audience

The very first step is knowing your audience as correctly as possible. Identifying your audience will make it easier for you to make decisions and build a strong promotional strategy. You can ask some questions and answering them will help this along. Some of the questions can be:

• Who is your typical customer?
• What’s the age group they belong to?
• Where do they live?
• What industry do they work in?
• How can you best reach your target market?
• What is their expectation from you as a business? How can they face their challenges using your product or service?
• What is their interest outside your business, product or service?

You can use these and other relevant Q&As to build your audiences’ profile. Here is an awesome blog on how you can build a successful SMM strategy for your business that you can read.

Define Your Goal

Once you define your target audience, your next step will be defining your goal as a business owner. Every business’ primary goal is to increase sales, yet there are other creative goals achieveable through social media. If used effectively,

• It can make stand your brand unique and distinct from your competitors.
• You can connect to your audience in a more personal way. 
• Bring traffic to your websites.
• You can use it for customer support.
• Make new announcements of new things in your business.
• Help you to build brand loyalty.
• Generate leads using paid and free social media practices.
• Engage your customers.

Looking at these multiple goals serving benefits, you can say social media has the potential to affect your bottom line.

Locate Your Target Audience

Now that you have built your audience profile, and have a clear idea about goals, you can take the next move towards locating your target audience. To do this, what is important for you is to determine which social media platforms your audience uses. Going deeper, you can also research which platforms they use actively. Below is a quick guide on active members on different social media platforms, their age group, and for which objective they can be used and their purpose.

Facebook

• Active members: 1.3 billion
• Age group: 25-54
• Best suited for: Building a relationship with your target audience

LinkedIn

• Active members: 660 million
• Age group: 30-49
• Best suited for: Business development, B2B business

Twitter

• Active members: 600 million
• Age group: 18-29
• Best suited for: Public Relations

Instagram

• Active members: 200 billion
• Age group: 18-29
• Best suited for: Lead Generation, Brand awareness

YouTube

• Active members: 1 billion
• Age group: All ages
• Best suited for: Brand awareness

Pinterest

• Active members: 70 billion
• Age group: 25-34
• Best suited for: Brand authority, Lead generation for B2C 
• Hope these stats help you find the purpose of using social media for your business. And remember, the numbers don't lie.

Study of Competitors

Keeping an eye on what your business competitors are doing can help you a lot. You can conduct a competitor analysis which could include a study like, which social media platforms they are using, what type of content they are sharing, how often they are posting, which hashtags they are using, which posts are getting tremendous engagement, who are they tagging, are they responding to comments, etc. You can gather all this data and you will get enough ideas to focus on. You can visit your competitors’ websites and find social media links either in their header or footer section. Depending on your industry, you can search for at least 5 competitors and then conduct in-depth research on their strategy. You can also use a tool from Sprout to make this task easier for you. There are some other affordable SMM tools to use for marketing that save your time.

Mistakes to Avoid

While following these steps, there are some things you can follow to avoid mistakes in identifying the right social media platforms for your business. Making these mistakes might hurt your intention of using social media to its best use and ultimately end up slowing down the growth of the business. Remember that you have to have a clear idea of what to post, when to post, and set clear goals of using specific social media channels. So, develop a strong social media strategy with clearly defined goals. Here, you can also decide which type of posts you will be using to define your brand tone.

Do not make the mistake of assuming all social media platforms are the same because different social media platforms serve different strengths, tools, and are also diverse in their audience profile with varying demographics, behaviors, and interests as we’ve seen above.

Social media is a powerful way, like no other, for promotion and tracking progress in real time. This will allow you to make strategic changes to your current best practices and save time, expenses, and avoid waste of resources. So, always give time to analyze and optimize social media activities.

Things like not responding to comments or feedback from your customers on social media may seem minor but if you focus on it then they can be a strong point that will help your audience make decisions, like whether to consider you to fulfill their future needs. If you promptly respond to your audiences’ questions and comments, there are chances they can refer you to someone else and you also end up making a good impression on your customers. Here you get a chance to give your personalized attention towards your audience which makes them feel special. And who doesn't like a human touch to a conversation while doing business? So, wise advice to you is to engage with your customers and followers as soon as possible, and as nicely as possible. 

Also, be regular with your posting time. Do not over promote your brand, do not avoid your customers by neglecting or deleting their negative comments and do not buy likes or followers.

Takeaway

Doing everything you possibly can with the help of social media can lead you to meeting your business objectives. But it’s also equally important to choose the right social media platforms for promotion and spreading awareness to your audience. You have to pay attention to social media trends and match up accordingly. You can always take an audience-first approach, set goals, and bring value to them. If you put these tips into practice you will already be on your way to experiencing growth in your business using social media and skyrocketing your ROI which is what everyone wants.

To help you plan, execute and track, employing a social media marketing management service like Deck 7 will guide you through the process to help you achieve the desired ROI through social media, and in the chorus, it will free up your precious time to focus on other paramount things for your business.

All we would like to say to you: Ready, set, get social!