Are you choosing the right social media platforms?

Many social media platforms exist and some organizations believe that they need to be on all of them when implementing their social media strategy based solely on the reason that they are or were popular at some point. Below are some key points/questions to be considered before creating a profile/page on the next social media platform.

What are your objectives/goals?

It is essential to identify the goal(s) of any campaign before deciding on the platform(s) to be used. Is your objective to raise awareness, sales or to conduct market research? Each of these is important because they help to increase engagement with your target audience through tailored content for each goal on the desired platform. When pairing goals/objectives with social media platforms, ensure that the platform itself has the features to support the message you want to convey and attract the crowd the message is to reach.

Who is your target audience?

Identifying your target audience is critical because once the audience has been determined, it is then possible to determine the platforms on which to reach them. In order to determine the platforms on which to reach your audience, a customer profile must be done to determine their habits, patterns and preferences. What this customer profile does is give companies an insight into who your target audience is and what their lifestyle and what their daily routine is like.

Where is your target audience?

Now that we have determined the target audiences, the challenge now is finding out which platform they identify with. There is no benefit in the hit or miss approach which can only be determined by spending time and resources creating profiles on all the platforms. Socialites tend to be on Instagram and Snapchat for example, while older people are on Facebook, persons interested in current happenings and news tend to be on Twitter and persons that use Pinterest usually are those that like to gather all kinds of information save links to their favourite tidbits. Knowing these behaviours can help you to save time and efforts trying to reach an audience on platforms they are not likely to be on.

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