With the death of major social networks like Meerkat and Vine, knowing where to center your focus is key to staying alive in this competitive digital atmosphere.
Every startup should be active on multiple social networks. Focusing on only one social media platform may limit your audience and close doors to your ability to gain new leads.
However, no one social network is the best for every business. Several factors contribute to which social networks your startup should prioritize.
1. Target Niche
Your target niche the industry you plan on targeting in your social media marketing efforts. Defining your niche is especially helpful when it comes to promotion on forums, social media groups, and niche-specific social networks.
If you do not know where your startup belongs, determine what your function is. Where do you fit in the economy and in the digital community? Look at this
list of steps to find your niche.
2. Target Audience
Different from your niche, your target audience is who you plan to target in your marketing strategy. These people are literally the life of your business. Without customers, you have no business.
Hopefully, you have already defined who your target audience is. This is an essential step every startup should take in its marketing strategy. Get down the demographics, interests, and behaviors of your potential customers.
If your business is targeting small business owners, you might want to spend more of your time on LinkedIn than on Reddit. If you are targeting female millennials, Pinterest might be a better bet than Google+.
3. Focus Media
Some businesses are more focused on video marketing, while others are fixated on their blog strategies. Among podcasts, infographics, and ebooks, the type of media you promote your business with will greatly determine where you should focus your time online.
Apps like Periscope, Snapchat, and YouTube are more obviously concentrated on video. On the other hand, Twitter is great for starting trends (hashtags), Instagram is perfect for promoting pictures, and Facebook is an excellent place to share articles.
However, most social networks have integrated the use of the most widely used media—video. In fact, most social platforms allow for native video uploading and live streaming.
At the end of the day, your business should diversify its content. However, if you find more success with one medium of promotional content than another, ensure that your main social networks support this media.
4. Region
Although the internet is a global service, the popularity of social networks vary greatly by region. For instance, ever heard of QZone? If you are targeting freelancers in China, QZone will be more effective than Twitter, as it is the largest social media platform in the country.
Furthermore,
Facebook statistics reveal that Facebook is actually more prevalent in India than in the United States, where it was launched. Once you break down your region, you can better define your target area by state, province, or city.
5. Efficiency
Social media marketing is typically not enough to get your startup marketing campaign off the ground, though it is a key component. Spending an excessive amount of time posting, researching, sharing, tweeting, optimizing, and replying is inefficient.
Instead, find social media tools to help automate the process while focusing your time on other parts of your business that cannot be automated. You may even consider hiring a freelance social media manager to take care of the work.
However, choosing social networks that offer marketing tools and shortcuts is the most important way to maximize efficiency.
Most third-party social media tools integrate with any social network. However, you may want to spend less time on smaller, niche-specific websites if they do not offer automation functions.
6. Purpose
Determine what your purpose behind social media marketing is. Is your goal to convert new customers? Reach out for B2B marketing? Boost SEO? Build loyalty in existing clients?
Whatever your ambition is, certain social networks will better reach your goal than others. For example, Facebook and Twitter are great ways to network and meet new clients. On the other hand, Google+ can help best with SEO.
7. Analytics
The only way to find out which social networks actually work best for your business is to experiment. Analytics are the best way to determine where your business actually belongs online.
You may think Snapchat is the best route for your business, but analytics may show that you receive more conversions on YouTube. Regularly evaluate social media analytics such as views, likes, conversions, play rate, and more.
Paying attention to the
social media trends every year should also influence your company’s focus. Pounce on new social media trends before your competitors do. This will put your business ahead of the game.
Now that you know the in's and outs of choosing the best social networks for your business, it is time to take action. Research the top social media platforms in your region and niche.
Join them and start engaging and adding value, then build a social media marketing plan and implement it. The more time you spend online in your niche, the more information you will have and the more results you can achieve for your startup.
| About the Guest Author:
Brenna Clarine is a freelance blogger who writes and edits articles on a variety of topics. Check out her work at the
Valoso blog and benefit from her company’s unrivaled freelance video editing and videographer services at Valoso.