The Best Social Media Platforms for Your Business

“What social media sites should my business be on?” We get this question a lot. There are so many social media platforms with new ones joining the conversation all the time. So where should you set up shop?

This question isn’t as simple as it may sound. And the answer is never “start with them all and see what sticks.” Instead, we’d tell you to ask a few great questions: 

1. Why social media anyway?

Like with all great marketing initiatives, be sure to start with a plan. Ensure you've answered these key questions:

• Why are you looking to build your social media presence?

• What goals are you hoping to help or achieve by being on social media?

• What are the key messages, themes, stories that you want to share on social media?

• What kinds of conversation, communication, and/or feedback are you looking to collect from your followers?
  

2. Who are you trying to reach?

You’ll also need a firm grasp on who your target customers are and where they're spending their time. If you have a stakeholder persona, that’s a perfect place to start to answer this question. If not, try to determine who your customers are in terms of:

• Demographics: Age, gender, geography, etc. 

• Psychographics: What do they like? What are their hobbies and interests? What type of media do they watch/read/look up?

• Watering holes: Where do they hang out online and offline? What are the websites and platforms — social media and otherwise — that are most targeted to these people?  

• How do they use social media? What are they posting, sharing, and liking? Who do they trust? What kinds of influencers, brands or companies are they interacting with (or not)?

There are lots of ways to uncover this information — market research, talking to your sales and fulfillment folks, competitive intel, even social media itself can help you better understand your target audience.

3. Which Platforms Pose the Biggest Opportunity?

The reality is different platforms were created for different reasons, cater to different audiences, and offer your business different opportunities. Before you decide that “you have to be on Twitter because everyone is on Twitter,” it makes sense to stop and review at least the most prominent platforms and how they can help you reach your goals. 

Here’s a quick look at some of the majors:

Instagram

Audience profile: 1

Great for:

• Growing awareness of your brand and products/services

• Building strong brand presence and positioning

• Connecting and collaborating with influencers

• Joining and starting conversations

• Visually inspiring and engaging target audiences

• Thought leader branding

• Listening to what your target audiences like, want and care about

TikTok

Audience profile: 2

Great for:

• Building brand awareness

• Organically extending your reach

• Engaging community and building an audience

• Promoting sales

• Gathering customer feedback

• Having viral reach and impact without high volume of followers

• Educating and sustaining your audience
  

Red Flag: Data privacy and security risks have led to the ban of TikTok on government issued devices in some jurisdictions. Be ready to flex if this app’s audience dwindles as a result.

LinkedIn

Audience profile: 3

Great for:

• B2B marketing and relationship building

• Establishing thought leadership

• Sales prospecting and lead nurturing

• Attracting and informing prospective staff

Facebook

Audience profile: 4

Great for:

• Reaching your audience in a highly targeted way

• Building awareness of your brand, products and services

• Collecting feedback

• Joining and starting conversations

• 1:1 interaction with members of your target audience

Twitter

Audience profile: 5

Great for:

• Extending your reach

• Finding new customers

• Building awareness of your brand and products/services

• Listening to what’s going on in the industry and with target audiences

• Collecting feedback, joining and starting conversations

• 1:1 interaction with members of your target audience.
  

Red Flag: Recent ownership changes have made the Twitter landscape…rocky. It’s worth having more than one platform before putting all your eggs in these nests.

4. What Are Your Content Capabilities?

There’s nothing worse than an abandoned social media channel. Or a company that blasts the exact same messaging out to all of their social properties. It’s at best heavy handed and at worst disrespectful to your hard won followers. 

Before you commit to building a home on social media, take a look at your content creation budgets, capabilities, and capacity. Each channel requires a strategy and unique messaging (good news: the channels can work together if you create a strong social strategy from the get go and thoughtfully slice, dice, adapt and reformat content to best match the channel).

There’s no magic formula for frequency of posting, except to be consistent. Do your best to set a schedule and stick to it. 

Looking at the same four social platforms, here are our recommendations for publishing content that has impact. Whether you hire an agency with expertise, or look to DIY internally, which of these could work for your company?

Instagram Content Recommendations:

• A beautiful, thoughtful grid filled with images that tell the story of your brand and sell possibilities, not products, features or benefits

• Reels, stories, and reposts that add personality, relevancy, and authenticity to your brand

• Polls, questions, and quizzes that encourage interaction and develop relationship

• A LinkTree that allows users to easily access fulsome content 

• News, offers, and contests — timely content that adds value or interest immediately to your followers

TikTok Content Recommendations:

• Think like a content creator, not a salesperson 

• Fun, engaging, short videos that are authentic representations of your voice and position you as a value-bringing guide 

• Use a clear hook, always 

• Create informative, relevant, and snappy videos that debunk myths, address pain points, and offer value to your audience such as skits and memes, product showcases, reviews and recommendations, behind the scenes, or a day-in-the-life-style videos

• Showcase your expertise in a certain area to build interest in a subculture community (#BookTok, #MomTikTok, #FitTok, to name a few) 

• Experiment with depth, length, and different topics

• Establish authority, but keep it real with: How-tos and tutorials, explainer videos, mistakes to avoid, etc. 

• Plan for frequent posting to engage the algorithm

LinkedIn Content Recommendations:

• Start with your profile! This is a business network first, and a social platform second. Spend your initial efforts focused on ensuring your profile is complete, current, “readable”, and valuable.

• Sharing specific, valuable content that speaks to the business need and value of your products/services and would be seen as helpful, new, and refreshing to this audience

• Localized and fully customized content that speaks to key prospect pain points, consider strategically @ mentioning a prospect who this is especially created for

• Contribute to group conversations with helpful, valuable insights and perspectives

• Strategically curate and share content that supports your thought leadership and is valuable to the audience

Facebook Content Recommendations: 

• You’ve got lots of options here! On this versatile platform, publish multimedia content that teaches, informs, entertains, and connects your brand to your target audience. Within that broad framework, we recommend that your content is: short, visual, varied, relevant, timely, memorable, shareable and viral worthy.

• Consider the platform’s robust group option for gathering a disparate community and focussing your content efforts there

Twitter Content Recommendations: 

• Short and sweet/snappy messages such as key takeaways, inspirational quotes, debunking pervasive myths, or impactful messages with links to the full story

• News, offers, and contests — timely content that adds value or interest immediately to your followers

• Visual content including images, videos, GIFs, and memes created to educate, engage, inspire, and inform

• Interactive content that poses a question, asks for feedback or includes a poll

• Relevant, interesting, curated content that you find valuable and think your audience will too
  

All Told

When looking to choose the social media sites that will help boost your business, start by investigating what platforms are used by your audience and that feature the types of content you can create on a regular basis.

If you’re a large B2C company with a marketing team and a healthy budget, maybe this decision is easy and you get started on many channels.  If you’re a smaller organization or a B2B with a very particular audience you may choose to only invest in one channel (or maybe to forgo social media altogether!). That’s okay, too.

It’s better to have one or two robust, high engagement social media channels than to have a whole suite of abandoned, low engagement accounts with virtually no followers.

Key Takeaway

For social media success, start with WHY, be realistic about your content creation capabilities, and choose your channels carefully.

Kristy Guthrie is the Founder and Principal Strategist of Bright Light Content where she uses her flair for strategy, and for life, to bring out the best in brands and people.

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