If you are struggling to determine which of the countless social media channels your business should include in your marketing strategy, you can take solace in the fact that you are not alone. Every business today needs to decide where it makes sense to invest time and energy when it comes to social media, and with so many options to choose from, it can feel overwhelming.
Some businesses try to solve this dilemma by trying to be everywhere at once. This typically results in poor performance across the board and leads to staff burnout. Instead, it is much more productive to be selective about where you focus your strategy so that you can maximize your efforts and meet your audience where they actually are.
In this article, we will walk you through steps that you can take to discover which social channels make the most sense for your business.
Now you need to ask yourself what you are hoping to accomplish with your social media strategy. This will help you determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be tracking and which social channels are best suited to help you achieve your goals.
Which of the following do you hope to achieve with your social media strategy?
Your answer to the question above will help inform what you should be tracking. For instance:
If you have already done the work of creating customer profiles, they will come in handy during this step. If it has been a while since you visited them, dig ‘em out and dust ‘em off because they will make this process a lot easier.
Of course, no audience is monolithic, but having a mental picture of who you are trying to reach is crucial to determining where to meet them on social media.
If you haven’t done an audience identification exercise before, the following questions will help you get an idea of who you should be targeting. Of course, no audience is monolithic, but having a mental picture of who you are trying to reach is crucial to determining where to meet them on social media.
As you answer these questions, you should start to visualize exactly who you are trying to connect with, and you might already have some ideas of which social media channels this person spends most of their time on. For example, meet James:
James is a 43-year-old male living with his wife and no children in a two-bedroom home he inherited from his family in the liberal mountain town of Boulder, Colorado. He is the sustainability director at a successful organic dishwashing soap company. He speaks formally in work settings but is quite casual in day-to-day conversations. He spends a good amount of time on LinkedIn as he is responsible for hiring the growing sustainability department. On Twitter, he follows the U.S. Department of Energy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Denver Nuggets. He’s had a Facebook account for a while but doesn’t remember the password and isn’t bothered to try to find it. He has an Instagram account but he never posts and doesn’t engage much other than liking his wife’s posts.
If you are in the business of selling commercial solar and you want to target James on social media so your company can install solar on the roof of the new organic dishwashing soap warehouse, on which platform(s) would you focus your efforts?
What social platforms make sense for you? These questions should help you find out.
Some social media platforms just make sense for certain businesses. For example, Instagram and Pinterest are a natural fit for beauty brands or landscaping companies given the highly visual nature of their service.
But what if you own a commercial paper shredding company or you produce lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles – what social platforms make sense for you? The questions below should help you find out.
A good next step is to take a close look at how your competitors are using social media. This will help you understand where they are succeeding and where they might be having a hard time. The goal here is not to duplicate your competitors’ social media strategy; the goal is to analyze their successes and failures in order to inform your own unique strategy.
When exploring what your competitors are doing on social media, take stock of:
When exploring the strategies of your competitors, try to be realistic about your own content creation capacity. For example, if videos are clearly your competitor’s highest performing type of content, but you have no video production resources, you might need to explore a different angle or find outside help for video creation.
You should now have a solid understanding of:
Now it is time to pick which social media platforms make sense for your business. Here is a breakdown of some of the current leading social channels to help you determine what might be a good fit for you.
Overview: Character-limited, news dense social media platform that is an excellent tool for B2B marketers.
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Cons:
Overview: Large user base and access to scary amounts of personal information make this platform a social media advertiser's dream come true.
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Overview: Hyper-visual social media platform that is popular among millennials.
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Cons
Overview: Professionally-oriented and great for sharing company and industry news/updates.
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Cons:
There are plenty of additional social media platforms that might make sense for your business and might be worth researching after following steps one through four. This includes YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, TikTok, Clubhouse, and many more.
What to learn more about how to select and leverage the right social media platform that will benefit your clean energy business? DG+ has experts who can help you elevate your marketing strategy with a targeted approach to social media.
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