Social media marketing has become all the rage these days. Unfortunately, this also means that most businesses simply do not know which platform is best suited for their brand and what kind of impact marketing on a particular platform can have for the visibility for their brand. We try to make the process of picking a social media platform to market your brand a little simpler to understand.
1. Know your goals
Before picking a social media platform to market your brand, you need to determent what exactly is it that you are hoping to achieve through such a campaign. Do you want people to know your brand exists? Do you want to inform them about current deals and sales? Do you want to showcase your product range? Do you want to showcase your expertise? Do you want to pull more people to your brand’s website? By identifying your goals, you would be able to pick the perfect platform and devote your energies into managing that.
2. How much traffic are you ready for?
A tweet like “50 percent off on all golf equipment this weekend” could send hundreds of thousands of potential buyers to your website, e-store and even the physical store within hours. While that may seem like a great thing, imagine having to turn away buyers or having your website crash due to traffic overload. A similar offer shared through Facebook ads or updates, however, will only be seen by fans or people who have specified golf or sports as an interest which would make handling traffic and customers a lot easier.
3. Know the internet habit of your target audience
When building a brand through social media marketing, you need to know how your target audience uses a given platform. For example, female shoppers are more likely to stay in touch with their brand though Twitter’s mobile app or Pinterest; gamers are more likely to read blogs; male professionals are likely to check their LinkedIn pages more often; people looking for tutorial videos are more likely to watch YouTube videos; and people are more likely to share interesting information about deals, sales, discounts etc. through twitter and Facebook. Knowing where your audience would thus be crucial for your brand.
3. How much time can you devote to a given platform?
Even though you may want to have your brand present on all social media platforms, you need to understand that managing each kind of platform takes a lot of effort. For example, if you cannot create interesting videos every few days or once a month, a YouTube channel wouldn’t be effective for you; if you do not have much to tweet about, twitter won’t work for you; and if you don’t have the time to respond to customers’ comments and queries very regularly, Facebook would not do much for your brand.