Three Major Factors in Deciding Which Social Media Channels to Use

By Sean MacEntee

How could one social media channel be the perfect and only way for a brand to communicate? As in the real social world, you don’t communicate with all of your friends, family, and colleagues in the same way. Social media marketing is not one size fits all nor is it all sizes fit one. Certain brands may find that having a primary channel, along with a supporting channel, works best for them; others that at least three platforms meet all of their marketing needs. Setting aside the need to identify who in the company can do the work and how much it will cost, there are three overarching considerations. First, the journey to figuring out what is going to allow your brand to get its voice heard and a conversation flowing starts where every purchase ends, with the customer. Second, what type of content represents your brand and suits the chosen channels? Last, but most importantly, what do you want to achieve with social media marketing?

First, knowing your customer is crucial. As a social media platform matures, user profiles and usage patterns emerge. Aligning those profiles and patterns with your target customer(s) is the first step to identifying the most beneficial channel for your brand. And if you’re already immersed in social media, evaluating the success of those channels can help to streamline personnel demands while expanding concentration on the two or three channels that are reaching your target customer. The great thing is that with social media you can get into more lifestyle and psychographic parameters to choose your ideal audience, but to start, demographics still have their place. And yes, this calls for an infographic.

Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, Omnibus Survey, Aug 2-5, 2012

You're a golf club manufacturer and retailer; your target customer is a middle-aged male college graduate who makes more than $75,000 a year? LinkedIn’s users fit that profile far better than Pinterest. Plus, LinkedIn is a place for networking and so is the golf course! LinkedIn has also developed a sales solution that recommends and tracks, leads. Now, would it be wise to make LinkedIn the only choice for your golf talk? Certainly not. According to the 2014 Facebook Demographics Report, the biggest population growth for the platform came from the 55+ age group — a user base exploded by 80.4% from 2011 to 2014. Facebook also still has the advantage of being inarguably the most widely used social media platform out there, making it a good primary or complementary channel for most any sort of business. As of December 2014, you can get interested golfers shopping and calling right from your page with Facebook’s call-to-action buttons.

Secondly, consider the type of content makes sense for you to distribute (and start a conversation about) and what types work best on the platform your target customers are on. For example, does your company produce video? Obviously you will want to have a powerful presence on YouTube. Do you publish time-sensitive articles? Tweet away. Are you a nature-lovin’ mama who makes her own cleaning products in cute mason jars? Get pinning and make a business of it. Each platform is optimized for certain content types. 

Source: Edge Media

But let’s get back to our golf club brand. Examples of the sort of content you may produce could be:

·      Video tips and interviews with pro golfers

·      Articles about the materials clubs are made of

·      Pictorials of beautiful courses from around the world

Review the content types and make sure your chosen social media channels not only have those capabilities but that those content types are also prevalent in usage on those channels. Looks like things are lining up for LinkedIn, Facebook, and your golf-related content! Take another step in discerning content: consider whether you want all of these morsels to lead the customer back to your blog or website. Some major companies, like Zappos, have opted to allow the shopping experience to all happen within Facebook. It may be a seamless journey for the customer, but does it accomplish the goal that is your third differentiating factor in choosing social media channels?

That is, if you’ve defined your goal for social media. According to a 2014 survey by Social Media Examiner, 92% of marketers indicated social media is important for their business and 97% participate in social media while only about one in three (37%) agreed they are able to measure their social activities. Don’t go in blind or you’ll never understand your ROI! Defining your goal, strategies, and objectives should have already occurred; otherwise, why would you even be evaluating tools such as social media? If you aren’t sure where to start, take a look at the most common business benefits of social media.

Source: Social Media Examiner

Do any of these line up with overall business objectives? Use those as a starting point. This golf club company wants to increase exposure, increase traffic, and generate leads. One of these matters isn’t directly addressed by Facebook or LinkedIn: increasing traffic to the website. Luckily, with most any of the social media channels, leading your customers back to your website is as easy as linking. But what are these customers and leads linking to? The corporate website, the e-commerce page, a blog? Is the company prepared to maintain these areas in addition to the social networking pages? If not, maybe that’s not a SMART goal for this fiscal year and just using Facebook and LinkedIn are the two channels on which the golf club company should concentrate its efforts. There is so much social media has to offer though, so take a look again. Improving search rankings could help increase brand exposure. According to Edge Media, Facebook and LinkedIn are a boon to SEO.

So now you have goals, a target audience, and content to get the conversation started. The conversation? Yes, being social requires conversation. You want people to talk and share with your company and amongst one another. On the right channels, with talent on your side, your vision (goals) about who to talk to (target audience) and what they're interested in talking about (content) should be a conversation-starter to rival an after-work cocktail. (OK, I may have overstepped there.)