How to Choose Social Media Platform For Your Next Campaign

You’ve heard it before; Social media is a “must” not a “maybe” for today’s businesses. It is an inexpensive way to generate a loyal group of friends and followers from across the demographic spectrum, even as you promote and strengthen your brand online. It’s also invaluable for gaining free feedback about the products and services you offer. Then, why don’t more businesses get a good return from social media?

It’s not as simple as pasting a few social media profiles up and waiting for people to start knocking at your virtual door. Yes, just getting started is probably the hardest part of a social media campaign, but there are plenty more things to learn to increase your views, shares, and audience participation. It does not have to be intimidating, though. Here are five questions you should ask yourself before you start:

1. What Goals Do You Want to Achieve With Social Media?

Business owners have goals - all the time. Rolling out a social media campaign is no different than rolling out an advertising campaign, although some businesses don’t understand how to track metrics to make sure they are achieving goals as they go along, like they might with an advertising campaign. Don’t let that stop you from setting goals, however, and then you can learn how to measure them properly, later on.

Here is a list of simple goals any business can choose to achieve from their online activities:

• Get more word-of-mouth attention,
• Create a wider audience exposure for their business,
• Link with other businesses to create B2B opportunities,
• Generate more sales/conversions for products and services.

Any one of these goals, or all, is a good one for a social media campaign. You will soon find out, after a bit of research, that some platforms, like LinkedIn are better for B2B opportunities, while Pinterest and Instagram help you increase conversions by posting tempting images. Facebook and Twitter both work to increase word-of-mouth through sharings and likes.

If you’re not sure which platform might work best for your goals, then check out Buzz Sumo to find out where leaders in your industry have profiles and how they use them to achieve their own goals.

2. Where Do Your Clients Congregate Online?

Here, you try to match your ideal customer profile to the right platform. Obviously, you don’t want to waste time putting up a social media campaign on a site that doesn’t even interest your ideal buying audience. You can find out the demographics of any site, like Facebook, to determine if it is a match for your audience, by checking out alexa.com or doing some customer demographic research via Google’s search engine. In general, you will find:

• Facebook tends to attract an older demographic than sites like Instagram (where users usually are 35 years or less).
• More females are attracted to sites like Pinterest, than males.
• Businesses frequent LinkedIn and it is often used for recruiting.
• Tumbler and Snapchat are for teenagers.
• Technical people spend a lot of time on Reddit.
• The biggest social media sites tend to still be Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
• YouTube is owned by Google, so that you can combine it with activity on Google+ for better engagement.

Don’t just match up the audience, but also match it to your business offerings. If you sell tasty food treats, it might work better to have a campaign on Pinterest than Facebook, simply because you’re distributing more images. However, if you’re creating recipes, then a video channel with YouTube might work better.

3. Do You Understand Your Time Limitations and How to Leverage Technology?

Do you have the in-house resources to create content, post status updates, moderate discussions, and take images and videos? You need to take these types of extra activities into account to understand what type of campaign you want to roll out and what platform to choose ahead of time. Even tweeting on Twitter has to be done several times a day to stay engaged on social media.

Once you understand the time demands, seek to leverage technology. There are plenty of tools to automate social media postings, like HootSuite and SocialOomph. Consider outsourcing your content creation, whether it is text, video, or image creation.

4. Should You Create More Than One Campaign?

The simple answer is “yes.” Not only will you need to integrate your social media campaign with an email list campaign, but you will probably want to be on more than one social network at a time. Some experts recommend to have a profile on each of the four biggest players: Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. However, it’s strictly up to you where you choose to have a presence.

Since you’re not always talking to the same audience or even emphasizing the same offerings on any one channel, make each unique. Niche them for the audience you have in front of you.

5. How Can You Get Noticed on Social Media?

Try a few of these tips to get noticed, once you are online on social media:

• Use keywords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in your descriptions and written content.
• Always use professional images for your headshot and logo.
• Make it easy to share blog articles on your website by installing the widget for easy-sharing buttons.
• Follow and friend big names in your industry.
• Comment and interact with big names in your industry on their social media channels.
• Create original, quality, content and share it on all your feeds.
• Curate other people’s quality content and share it on your feeds, giving them credit.
• Have a posting schedule so that your audience knows to check you out frequently.

How Do You Know Your Achieving Your Goals?

Are you tracking how many likes, shares, and comments you are getting each week on your social media feeds? What topics are the most popular? Have you surveyed your audience to see if they’re engaged and satisfied? If you’re using tools like Hootsuite or Google Analytics, you can measure traffic and engagement much more easily. Learn to quantify your goals so that you can see if they are progressing nicely.

Advance More and More With Your Goals

Once you are more confident, try a split-test to determine which content is the best. This means making minor changes in one piece of content and directing half the traffic to one version and half to the other and seeing which gets shared more or creates more conversions. Above all, never stop learning. The more you work with online campaigns, the more return you should see with it until it becomes an easy way to generate attention instantly.

In the end do us a little favor and share this article with others, for there’s a good chance that it will help them with their content marketing.

To help you get started with content marketing, download this bonus How to Generate Leads Using Facebook Toolkit. In it you’ll find a PDF guide filled with even more advice on how to use social media marketing to generate more leads.