Which Social Media Platform is Right for Your Business?

Whether you’re an experienced social media expert or looking to start, understanding the influence of social media can maximize your brand’s reach. Your company can engage the right audience and people while achieving your social media goals long-term. Choosing the right social network isn’t locked to the size of the network. It needs to be the right fit for your business while hitting the right target audience. You’ll also want to consider how many social media networks you can manage at once without sacrificing the quality of posts.

It’s important to remember your company doesn’t have to be on every social media site, especially if you’re just getting started (or trying to manage the accounts on your own). More isn’t always better if you’re not handling the accounts properly. Before joining a social media platform, try to assess whether your company will grow because of the network. Is your target audience on the network? How can you engage those followers?

Audience is Everything

The right social media channel will help you find potential leads, interested individuals wanting to purchase over time. Your audience should see your company, access your information, and interact with your brand. Without the right audience, your company is simply spilling content into a void that will never be found.
To help get you started, here are three considerations when defining your target audience and where to find them online:

Visual Audience

Creative visual companies use strong images, visually aesthetic content, and marketing materials that hold attention online. These businesses might include artists, makeup artists, graphic artists, photographers, and videographers. When your focus is on a specific product or service with visual appeal, you need to find a social media network that highlights your talent. Two social media platforms that cater to the visual audience include Pinterest and Instagram.

Pinterest offers a virtual pinboard where users can collect images from the web. These pinboards organize in whatever fashion a user wants but bookmark individual webpages through the saved image. Pinterest brings inspiration and ideas to hobbies and interests online. It is the 14th largest platform globally, with 459 million monthly users. This platform is ideal for anyone offering products or services wanting to increase their brand. The more pins a photo receives, the more visibility and exposure a company can achieve.

Instagram is a free social networking platform built around photo and video sharing. Users can connect with accounts that interest them, following friends, family, celebrities, and businesses. Users receive updates on their feed with recent posts from everyone they follow. Users can comment, like, and share any posts they find. Instagram also uses hashtags on the forum, connecting posts directly to any similar posts. Over a billion users use the app every month, with 62% of users logging in daily. Two hundred million users view a business profile every day. This platform is ideal for companies promoting their products or services while staying directly connected to potential customers. With direct messaging functionality, leads can message businesses, order online, or keep in contact through the platform.

Engaged Audience

Virtually every social media platform is designed to engage your audience, whether you’re sharing posts, photos, or tweets. If you’re a service-related business, there’s a good chance you only service specific areas. Focusing your attention on local traffic isn’t impossible on social media; you’ll want to stick with networks that allow geographical targeting. Targeting includes specifying a specific neighborhood, city, or area. Facebook and Twitter are two social media networks that will enable targeting without compromising your marketing efforts.

Facebook has 2.74 billion active users every month, with 50% of the world’s social networking population. It currently ranks third in most popular website visited, making it an ideal network to promote your business. Facebook offers customized targeting for all sponsored content, along with business pages. You’ll be able to specify service areas, the target audience for posts, and encourage followers to share, like, comment, or order through the site.

Twitter brings 353 million active monthly users, with over half of users accessing the platform daily. Ninety percent of the U.S. population is familiar with Twitter, even if they don’t actively use it. Users access a real-time feed while using the app, combining hashtags and followers. You can tag individuals in tweets, direct message followers, and post promotional materials online using hashtags.

Generation Z Audience

As Gen Z pushes through as the primary buyers in a few years, they currently represent $143 billion in buying power. That’s not including household spending. This age group is between 6 and 23 right now, with most of the registered users on social media platforms. Although Facebook is currently considered the most popular network, Gen Z is sticking to alternative platforms like TikTok and Snapchat.

TikTok currently has 689 million active users a month, with 60% of users hitting the 16-24-year-old age bracket. Videos are shared, uploaded, and engaged online, with the average user spending hours at a time browsing the feed.

Snapchat is an image and video messaging app that features stories, chat, and multimedia sharing. Two hundred eighty million registered users hit the platform monthly, many of them being the teenage demographic. Early on, getting in front of adolescent demographics can improve your company’s brand long-term, especially as these users come into buying power.

How to Identify your Audience?

A target audience is a specific group of people that are most likely to want your services or products. Ideally, they are the consumers you should target when approaching social media. You can organize the target audience by income, location, interests, or age. If you only target a specific geographical location, arranging the target audience by the city is another strong approach. Identifying your target will improve social media efforts, primarily if the general population uses or interacts with the network.

Learning how to identify your target audience doesn’t have to be complicated. It starts with a simple evaluation. You want to build a profile of the ideal buyer, which evaluates multiple demographics simultaneously. From there, research the current market and your competitors.

Understand Your Current Customers and Audience

Start by evaluating the current customers you have, along with any demographics about the audience you’ve built. You’ll want to create an ideal customer profile, which takes the common characteristics found in your customers (age, location, income, and gender are great starting points). Review current customer influence. How do they find your site, what do they purchase (if anything), how do users access your company (mobile or desktop), and do they use coupons?

Conduct a Market Research

Evaluate your target audience with primary and secondary research. This evaluation might include buying habits through direct contact, surveys, interviews, or focus groups. You want to better understand your customers by getting feedback about the features they consider valuable, considerations when buying, and the influence of competitors.

Research your competitors

If you’re trying to learn which areas to focus on, start by observing your competitors. This research will highlight strategies that are already successful, their audience approach, pricing strategies, and more. Start by evaluating what social networks they use. Determine how they interact on the platforms, what influencers (if any) they use, and how often they post.

Conclusion

Having a social media strategy is an integral part of building your company’s brand and exposure. Knowing your target audience is the first step in capitalizing on your efforts, especially when you’re first starting. Getting in front of the right people means understanding your business and the people you’d like to connect with overall. By analyzing the various social media platforms, you’ll better understand where your customers are and how to approach them long-term.