One among the most common dilemmas of any business is finding out where to begin with your social media marketing. I want to introduce some high level ideas in order to assist you to choose where to put in your time for getting the best result for your business. Like with anything else in life, there’s frequently an exchange between efforts and business advantages and the social media isn’t different.
Please note that there are NO common strategies or solutions that fit each business. What I’m proposing here shouldn’t be taken as “Gospel.” This blog post contains wide generalizations — you still need to utilize common business sense in order to determine what best fits for you. Let us get started.
Ultimate goal
Nowadays, there are many astonishing things that a business can perform to create advantages from social web — business intelligence, customer service, and creating alertness to name some. But today I wish to suppose that your main goal is to produce an actionable audience base — that’s, develop an online group of people who will produce some business advantage for you over the time.
Let us cover some key concepts about creating that actionable audience on social media:
Weak links vs. strong links — A popular misconception is that your “audience” equals “action. But it doesn’t. If you’re reading this post, then you may have discovered it via Facebook or Twitter. But if you’ve no emotional connection with me as blogger, will you hire me? Purchase my marketing books? Never. Social media marketing just opens up the doors for connections through some weak relational links. Still you’ve to do the difficult work to turn the folks into buying clients.
Reliable reach — If you tweet anything, it’s type of like just throwing a message inside a bottle in the sea, isn’t it? And you don’t actually know who’ll read it … or whether anyone will. But, if someone subscribes to a YouTube channel or blog, they’re asking for your current content. There’s a good possibility they will see it actually. The social media marketing goal is to direct much more audience members to subscription — reliable reach — over the time, There generally is a relationship between time you put in social media and level of dependable reach you achieve.
Role of content — The content is a catalyst which leads to online awareness. Awareness might then result in engagement and that engagement may result in trust and even reliability over time. Creating, distributing, and curating content is the financial driver of the social media success. Different platforms need different kinds of content, a few simple, a few complex. This is very important for any business to consider.
BEST SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR YOUR BUSINESS
The default place for best social media platform appears to be Facebook. Though Facebook is unquestionably important, let us stack it up onto other platforms in context of our final goal of creating an actionable audience.
1. Facebook
It is just like a gambling obsession. You keep investing more and more wealth into it as the idea of huge payoff is quite intoxicating. You cannot ignore Facebook. It is popular and huge but in numerous ways, it is the hardest platform to navigate.
In order, to actually succeed, you should be a conversational business, or become one.
It takes lots of efforts and money to build up an audience — but Facebook keeps you far from them. Facebook harshly limits access to audience.
While Facebook appears to be simple (and free of course!) it is not. In order to get your contents on the timeline, you most likely need to spend too much on promotion, quality, or both.
If you’re a celebrity or an established and beloved brand in your own community, Facebook may be ideal for you. If you’re a regional company which hauls dangerous waste, maybe not. Therefore, it’s hard to put it at any one place. There are lots of complicated factors.
2. Twitter
It is not as easy as it might emerge. Although you’re limited to just 140 characters, it could be quite hard creating something significant in that little space.
This social media platform stands alone easily in its capability to generate a relevant, huge audience fast, but as you can’t target group of followers with any messages (at least still), it at times feels like you’re throwing a message to a large silent world. This platform is excellent at making primary connections that can result in reliable reach on other platforms like a podcast or blog.
3. Pinterest
It is the only social media platform when it comes to “low work and high reach.” Mainly, you are generating audience value just by curating content (instead of creating content) from any other sources on web into some logical pages which will entertain and inspire. And when you do an outstanding job with curation, then you can build an extremely loyal audience. A sign of this platform’s capability to create a lively audience is that the pinned items attract more online traffic than other platforms.
4. YouTube
It has the eminent position of being second major search engine across the world. That is no small feat when we consider that Yahoo and Bing have been vying for that place. YouTube did it even without trying.
But, in spite of their humble pretensions to huge search, YouTube tends to be a hit when video watching is considered. Obviously. YouTube in fact reaches more adults than a cable network.
A few brands lend themselves onto video virality much more than others, however any brand can easily post videos. And a video does not need to be fancy or expensive to be efficient in brand promotion. The video needs to be there on YouTube.
Conclusion
Social media landscape can be quite bewildering. As you connect social media, you will learn the social nuances related to your niche. It’ll look different for each business, target audience, region, and personal style.
