Aligning Social Media Platforms with Business Needs

Aligning Social Media Platforms with Business Needs

     With the litany of social media platforms available in this day and age, many businesses make the mistake of focusing on quantity over quality.  They preoccupy themselves with establishing a presence on multiple platforms, which leads to a loss of efficiency and actually causes diminishing social media marketing returns.  In order to maximize the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign, it is imperative that your company carefully evaluate the social media platforms available, and determine which ones best suit it’s needs. 

     Prior to evaluating the ideal platforms for your businesses social media marketing project, it is essential that the target audience be identified.  For a deeper look on identifying the applicable target audience, please see my earlier blog.   Identifying the target audience is pivotal to the evaluation process because certain audiences tend to gravitate towards specific social media platforms.  For instance, if the target audience for a product was 18-25 year old college students and young adults, an extensive marketing campaign focused on the social media platform Linkedin would produce less benefit because it has a rather low usage rate amongst the target audience.

                                      What platforms would be popular with an audience like this?

     
     Once the target audience has been identified, your business can begin evaluating which social media platforms are most aligned with its goal of reaching the target audience. If your business operates on a business to consumer model, you will want to carefully evaluate the characteristics of the target audience.  Some of these characteristics would include age, socio-economic status, and sex.  The aforementioned characteristics in no way constitute a complete list of evaluation criteria, but they give you a general idea of what to look for when analyzing your target audience.  After breaking down the target audience, you can begin piecing together which social media platforms they are more likely to use, and just as importantly, which ones they will use on a regular basis. 

     A company that operates on a business to business model would approach platform selection differently than a business to consumer model company.  If you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense for a b2b company to create a Facebook fan page, and use Pinterest because its clients will not likely be using these platforms when making purchasing decisions.  Since b2b transactions take place in a more professional setting, it is likely however that potential customers could be reached on Linkedin.

                                     What platforms would attract an audience of business professionals?

     Going back to my previous example of a target audience of 18-25 year old college students and young adults, one can conclude with a high degree of certainty that individuals in this audience tend to frequently use platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and even Pinterest.  By concentrating social media marketing efforts on these platforms, a wide range of individuals within the target audience will be exposed to the marketing campaign, thus increasing the likelihood of a successful marketing plan.  As you can see, the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign can be greatly increased by using information about the target audience to select the most appropriate platforms for your campaign.