What Social Media Channels Should Your Company Be On?
In this ultra-connected era, businesses need social media much as fish need water to survive. According to Pew Research findings, 70 percent people are active on one or the other social media platforms and businesses can’t really afford to lose this big a chunk of potential customers. The implication doesn't mean you need need to start marketing on all the networks blindly. You just need to prioritize the networks where your target audiences are active and where you can get the maximum out of promoting your curated content.
Although there is no formula that you can follow on social networks that can guarantee success, we have identified a few that you just can’t ignore owing to their massive reach and great features:
Facebook features at the top of our list of social media powerhouses. With a user base of nearly 2 billion people, Facebook is a great place to start your Social Media outreach program or improve your brand’s visibility. The Audience Insights tool can be used for getting valuable insights about geography, demography, and purchase behavior (online vs. in-store) of your existing customers as well as potential customers. Then, you can use this knowledge to post content tailored to your market.
You can post all types of content (text, images, videos, events, advertisements) and use Facebook’s paid advertising to promote your page. The optimal posting frequency is once daily and the best time to post is on weekends and 1 PM to 4 PM on weekdays, but it will vary depending on your audience and also your product.
You can also get to market your brand on the numerous well-developed communities of industry peers and customers on Facebook groups.
Our Tip: Curating content is a cost-saving alternative to creating your own posts that require time, effort and money. Tools like Bitly indicate how many clicks were generated when a link was posted so you can identify the most traction-creating links to post on your page.
Twitter
If Facebook is good for mass marketing, Twitter can augment your customer relations. You can start, join and lead conversations revolving around your brand or industry. Get to know what people are saying about your brand through social listening tools (Hootsuite or Mention) and hashtag influencers having a large fan following to make your posts go viral. Twitter allows you to interact directly with customers (especially young people) as well as companies. Retweeting and sharing others posts is incredibly simple. The only downsides are the 140-character word limit and the trolls!
You can post text, polls, images, links, and videos on Twitter. The key to Twitter success is to be original, relevant and brief. To get engagement on Twitter, post multiple times daily from 1 PM to 3 PM on all weekdays.
Our Tip: Tools like Buffer allow you to stock and schedule posts in advance so that posting continues round-the-clock and you can reach audiences in impossible time zones. URL shorteners like Bitly compress links to a lesser character count.
Instagram
This Facebook-owned visual platform is based entirely on images and videos and is exclusively a mobile platform. Its 700 million-odd user base is majorly comprised of millennials (aged 18-34 years) and females. So, if this audience segment is on your radar, Instagram is a good fit for you. For this reason, Instagram is extremely popular among food, art, fashion, travel and DIY fraternities.
To be successful on Instagram, you need to post or curate high-quality images and videos or be able to use its great image and video filtering and editing features. Instagram followers are most active at 2 AM, 8-9AM and 5 PM on Mondays and Thursdays.
Our Tip: Use the integrated sharing functions for Facebook and Instagram to repurpose Instagram posts. Followgram is another great tool to check out popular tags and your stats on top-performing posts. Add relevant hashtags to drive engagement and monitor performance of your posts.
Find Your Best Fit
Social media trends keep changing and you may need to experiment with different platforms to identify those most effective for reaching your target markets. The most important part is to keep evaluating your efforts and modulate your plan accordingly.
In addition to the ones we have identified, there’s Pinterest, Snapchat and more. The social media platform you should be on depends on the type of people you want to engage. If you’d like to get a free consultation from the team at Results Driven Marketing on what social channels to engage for growing your business give us a call at 215-393-8700.
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