Here’s our guide on how to choose the right social media platforms for your business. Whether you’re trying to grow your business’ existing online presence or starting from scratch, choosing the right platform will help you reach your desired audience.
Please continue reading for our top tips on how to choose the right social media platforms for your business and why it matters.
Demographic Data And Why It Matters
You know the saying, ‘We’re all just a number’. Well, when it comes to demographics, that rings scarily true. Demographic data describes specific populations and their characteristics in statistical form.
Usually, demographics are used to segment populations based on generic identifiers, such as age, sex, location, and race. It can also be used to capture more specific socioeconomic data, such as employment, education, income, marriage rates, and more.
As a business, when it comes to defining your target audience or inventing a ‘buyer persona’, demographics tend to be all we have to go off. Aligning your brand with the behaviour of a target demographic will likely result in a successful marketing campaign.
Demographics can be used to contextualise the lived experience, observations, connections and the history of consumer markets. This provides further insight into what influences their buying behaviour.
How To Choose The Right Social Media Platforms For Your Business
Demographics can be found anywhere there are people. So, in the same sense that your business’s target audience has a demographic, as do different social media platforms.
Aligning your demographics with the leading demographic of a social media platform improves the likelihood of your content being seen by the right people.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to choose the right social media platforms for your business.
Understand Your Target Audience
Assuming your business is already up and running, and you have already identified your target audience, the first step to choosing the right social media platform is understanding them. If you’re a startup, then the initial step would be identifying your target audience. Check out that blog, and then come back and join us here!
To choose the right social media platform for your business, you need to understand where your target audience is spending your time online. You can use demographic data to understand the popular audiences of different social media platforms.
You can also use target audience characteristics to analyse the content your audience prefers when they’re active on social media, and often. Ultimately, the idea is to go where your audience is.
Define Your Business Goals
When starting off a business page on social media, there needs to be clearly defined goals and objectives for the content. This can alter the business direction, the content generated, and the best platform for the account to exist on.
Each social media platform has specific strengths and content trends. To achieve the best return on investment, you ideally want to align your business goals with platform-specific strengths:
- Facebook- Community building platform
- Instagram- Visual storytelling and influencer partnerships
- Twitter- Real-time engagement and trend-influenced content
- LinkedIn- B2B marketing and networking
- Pinterest- Visual content and product inspiration
- TikTok: Short-form, viral content
Evaluate Your Content Style
Some businesses do better at producing specific styles of content than others. For example, a fashion brand will do incredibly well at generating visual content. It’s also worth assessing the strengths of your team. If there is someone who excels in writing, writing, or creating graphics, then it’s worth capitalising on that for your content.
Different types of content do better on different platforms. On TikTok and Instagram, short video content does extremely well. Whereas blog content does well on platforms like LinkedIn. Community-relevant content is perfect for Facebook.
We advise playing to your strengths and optimise content by posting it on the platform where it is bound to thrive and get good engagement.
Test And Assess
Good social media management is hugely about evolving with trends and responding to audience engagement. If you try one thing and it doesn’t work, switch up. Yes, consistency is important when it comes to posting on social media, but if it’s not driving engagement and traffic, it’s okay to try something else.
You can track things like reach and engagement on the Meta Business Suite or Social Pilot. Try out some different styles of posts and then capitalise on the posts that perform better.
How GrowTraffic Chooses The Right Social Media Platforms For Your Business
We hope this guide on how to choose the right social media platforms for your business was useful.
Social media marketing can appear effortless, but in reality, there is a lot that goes into executing a successful strategy. At GrowTraffic, we can help you with crafting social media posts that are designed to boost shares, follows, likes, and create real growth for tangible results. Find out more about social media management services here.
We offer social media packages for smaller businesses to ensure they are hitting the mark and getting the exposure they need to grow. Take a look at our GT Small Business Essentials package here.
For more assistance on how to choose the right social media platforms for your business or to enquire about our services, contact us today. You can give us a call at 0161 706 0012 or email us at info@growtraffic.co.uk.
