You’re a busy entrepreneur. And if your team is relatively small, you do not have the manpower with the time to establish and maintain a presence on every social media platform out there. Nor should you really be on every platform. If you try to do that, in fact, here is what you will be doing:
- You will be spending time maintaining your presence on a platform that is not used by your customers and potential customers.
- You will be spread so thin that you won’t do any of it really well.
- You will be throwing “you know what” up against the wall and hoping that some of it sticks.
Not a good plan. What you want to do is narrow your choices and select only a few so that you can maximize effectiveness of idea generation and promote your content and brand where it should be promoted. So, how do you know which social media platforms to target and which to leave alone? Here are three practical steps you can take to make those good choices.
Identify Your Target Audience
You have probably done this already, but it is always a good idea to review and be certain that you have identified this audience as specifically as possible, and to see if there are demographics that need to be revised.
- Who is the typical customer you currently serve?
- What is the age-range of your customers?
- Are your customer predominantly one gender or evenly mixed?
- What is the educational level of your customers?
- What is the income range of your customers?
- Do you know what your customers have interests in other than your product/service?
#6 is often a neglected question. If you don’t have a good answer for this question, you need to do some research on your customer demographic. For example, Millennials are responsible for $5 billion in sales. What do you know about them? Where do they hang out on social media? What values and belief systems do they have?
What are Your Goals for the Use of Social Media?
Typical goals will always be to drive traffic to your website or to your local brick and mortar facility, so that you can achieve conversions and increase sales. You also know that you want to spread your brand among your targets, so that when they need your product/service they think of you.
Beyond this, given your target audience, what other goals could you have? Well, if you serve Millennials, and you understand how they develop loyalty to a brand, you know that they depend upon recommendations from their peers. So, how could you use social media platforms to give this demographic more exposure to and experience with your brand, so that they do recommend your product/service to their peers? Freebies and discounts are certainly one method. But there’s more.
They love humor and they love to be entertained. They also develop loyalty to brands that give back to their communities – that have a sense of social responsibility. How can you use social media to entertain them or to publicize the charitable work or contributions you make?
Exceptional Customer service should be another goal. How can you use social media for this function? No one in any customer demographic wants to spend time on hold waiting for a customer service rep to take his/her call. How about a Twitter account just for that purpose? A customer can contact you via Twitter with an issue. This past July, Twitter increased it DM character length to 10,000. This is huge for customer service, because should a customer have a complaint or an issue, and contact you via regular 140-character Tweet, you can respond through DM and provide much more assistance and generate more goodwill by resolving an issue quickly and privately.
You need to engage in some brainstorming – both to set social media goals and to see how to best implement them. Remember, social media isn’t the venue for the sale. It is the venue to show your commitment to your customers. Choose you platforms and your content with care.
Now – Find Your Audience!
You have to pick 2-3 platforms that will be your focus. Here is some very practical information on demographic use of each platform, so that you can match your customer to the most-used platforms.
All demographics are on Facebook – in fact 1.3 billion people worldwide. So your target customer is definitely there, but it is a matter of determining how they are using this platform. In general, Facebook is used to keep in contact with friends and to build new “friendships.” If you have current customers on Facebook, it is the perfect platform to keep in touch and to maintain those relationships. With certain demographics, you can also use Facebook as a tool for current customers to engage potential customers if they like what you post and want to share it. Facebook is so huge, you will have very limited coverage, so to expand that coverage, your posts will need to do the following:
- Really entertain with great shareable content.
- Give information that followers will want to share because it makes them look “good” or raises their “reputation” with their friends.
- Offer some great stuff free or at really good discounts.
- Publicize your customers by posting pictures of them using your product or service
- Give incentives to share your posts. If someone shares, they get a special discount or something free.
This is a great platform to spread your brand. You can search hashtags to find out what people are discussing, and then you can create your tweets to take part in those conversations. You can also use Twitter to publicize events and sales. Local restaurants and retailers use Twitter to give followers passcodes or coupon codes for discounts, and hose codes can then be shared with others. Interestingly, Millennials do not use Twitter as much, percentage-wise, as do some older demographics, and those older demographics are both men and women of middle and upper classes.
Here is probably the most specific demographic of all. It is visual (sort of like scrapbooking) and is used primarily by women for recipes, crafts, photos, and DIY projects. If your target is within this demographic, anything use Pinterest must involve really strong visuals. If you do this right, however, you can expect an increase in sales. If your demographic is of mixed genders and focuses more on career professionals, then Pinterest is not for you.
YouTube
All demographics use this platform, but for very different reasons. And currently this platform has over 1 billion users. It has become a search engine, in fact, so that every demographic, without having to sign up or establish an account can access this platform and look for anything. Here is how this can work for you. If you have a product or a service about which you can make great videos, then you can publish those with specific titles, so that searches will bring targets to those videos. One hugely popular category is “how to” videos. So, if you have a product, for example, and can produce a video on installation, on the many uses of it or how to use it to get the most benefit, then go for it.
The demographic for this platform is professionals in the 30-49 year old age bracket. It is used for job searches and for networking. However, if you are a B2B business, you can use this platform to generate leads by having a great company profile and by joining all of the networking groups that are directly or indirectly related to your niche and by participating in those groups’ discussions. You can promote yourself as an expert who gives great advice and establish sound relationships with businesses that will have need of your products or services now or in the future. You can also use LinkedIn as you grow and have a need to add employees.
This is a rapidly-growing platform but mostly for a younger demographic. And, it relies on visuals, specifically photos, to get across a message. If you are in a business of consumer products – beauty, fashion, food, home décor, for example – then this may be a good pick.
Google+
This is a good platform for SEO, because it is linked to Google’s search engine, and using it gives you more weight and higher rankings. The demographic for Google+ is male and older, and if you are in design, software and other technology-related business, this platform is probably a good one.
So many choices- but really not. As you can see, based upon your niche, it would be a waste of time to use some of these platforms. On the other hand, there will clearly be 2-3 that should be your focus. Narrowing the selection down means that you can really focus on establishing your presence where it will really matter.
