How To Pick The Right Social Media Platforms For Your Brand

This guest post is from Dia Darling, a digital marketing strategist. Check out her blog for tips on balancing your side hustle
with real life and follow her on Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest.

There are a lot of social media platforms out there and it seems like a new one is gaining attention and traction every few months. It’s hard to know which platforms to hop on to and which are going to waste your time.

If you are a one-person operation, then you don’t have the time to learn and become a master of all the social media platforms all at once.

You don’t want to halfway participate in 5 platforms when you could be excelling at two.

In order to really excel and connect with people on social media then you need to know 3 things:

Who your audience is
Where they hang out
The rules of where they hang out

Now let’s get into how to pick the right social media for your brand.

How To Pick The Right Social Media Platforms For Your Brand

In order to have a successful blog or online business you really need to know who your target demographic is. Are you appealing to mothers? Business entrepreneurs? Job seeking millennials? Really take a moment to think about who your message is for. Often the main mistake people make when determining their audience is limiting it to like-minded people.

On the other end of the spectrum, some people cast the net too wide and try to connect with everyone and be the brand everyone picks. Obviously, you should have things in common with your audience, like you’ve been where they are or you are where they want to be, but you have to think bigger than that.

Who is your audience?

What is the age range?
What do they use the internet for?
Do you aim more towards a certain gender?
Are you an ambassador for a certain cause?
What are their interests?
What are their goals?
What motivates them?

Create a client profile and write out your ideal client or reader in a detailed description.

If you are a paleo blogger you may not find much success in vegan markets. Really think about the things someone who works with you would like and what they wouldn’t respond to?

Where do they hang out online?

While there are countless social media platforms this exercise focuses on 4 of the most common platforms; Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. These are a great place to start.

Instagram

Image based mobile application. 2015’s fastest growing social network with over 400 million monthly users. Large teenage demographic.

Is your audience teens or millennials?
Does your product or service have a strong visual aspect, like design or art?
Instagram is great for very visual brands trying to reach a younger audience.

Niches that should definitely use Instagram include:

Fashion
Food
Photography
Fitness

Things to keep in mind: Instagram’s platform is very limiting when it comes to linking to products. Right now you can only have one active hyperlink in your profile bio. If you are looking for a heavy pick and click strategy you may want to utilize a more linkable format.

Pinterest

Image based online site with a mobile app. Easily shareable content. While the number of male users has increased, 8/10 Pinterest users are female. Pinterest has over 100 million users and growing.

Niches that should definitely use Pinterest include:

Food
Lifestyle
Fashion
Fitness
Home- Real Estate and Design

Things to keep in mind: While Pinterest does have a promotional platform, there are applications that help your pins become more visible like BoardBooster. Only high-quality pins get good traffic, so you will need to either invest time or money into making the high quality attention-getting graphics.

Learn how to pick the right #socialmedia platforms for your brand in this post from @DiaDoll & @BrittneyLLynn Click To Tweet

Twitter

I love Twitter. It’s one of the easiest ways to meet and engage with others. I also like that it limits the characters you can use in a post. It’s a quick, easy summary and then a link to learn more. This is actually a wonderful platform to use to connect with your audience because sharing the content of others and engaging is very easy.

While you can post pictures this isn’t a super image-driven platform. Yes, tweets with images get more engagement but this may not be the ideal platform to focus on for niches like fashion or photography. The hashtags make it easy to get your tweets noticed and find people you want to connect with. Twitter is great for business because you can connect to potential customers on a public forum they already hang out on. You can answer questions, get insights and gain more connections.

Niches that should definitely use Twitter:

Business Bloggers
Financial Bloggers
Lifestyle Bloggers
Companies looking to connect with a younger demographic

Things to keep in mind: Twitter is all about pitching as quickly as you can. If what you offer requires lots of explanation this may not be the best way to get new connections.

Facebook

There is a lot of talk about Facebook being over and that with all the constantly changing algorithms and policies that Facebook is only good reconnecting with people from middle school. Trust me, this is not the case. While Facebook is rightfully known for mixing things up on its users it is still a valuable social media platform. Facebook has a lot of the same benefits of Twitter but without the small character limit and options for multiple pictures and graphics.

If you are a blogger, one of the best benefits of using Facebook is connecting with other bloggers in blogger groups. While some say it is a dying platform it is still one of the most populated social media platforms and reaches more age demographics.

Niches that should definitely use Facebook:

Everyone- If another platform fits your brand or audience better, I recommend focusing on that platform then adding Facebook to the mix.

Things to keep in mind: Like any of these platforms, Facebook is heavily governed by its own set of rules. Commit the wrong infraction or if the platform undergoes a major change you could lose your fan base.

Final thoughts

While social media is so important in branding in business, it’s even more important to have a connection with your audience that you can control. Email subscribers are a stronger connection than social media followers.

Your favorite social media platform may not be where your target audience hangs out or where they search for the services you offer. Think like your potential customer not just yourself.