With so many social media channels available it can be difficult to know which ones you should be allocating time and efforts to. Plus they are constantly changing so what fits now might not fit in 12 months time.
Which channels should your business be using?
Overview of key channels you could use:
- Allows you to interact with your audience and build relationships
- Can help humanise your company and show your brand’s personality
- Can target highly-specific demographics and psychographics to receive marketing messages
- The Facebook user demographic has slowly shifted from a younger to an older demographic
- The biggest demographic on Facebook is aged between 35 and 55 years old
- The split between males and females is fairly even
- Allows you to share photos with an in-built editing tool to increase photo creativity
- Business owners can share photos of their products, people and services
- Can use a hashtag to make sharing and tracking easy
- Integrates very well with Facebook (especially now they own Instagram)
- Very popular and fast-growing network
- Over 50% of Instagram users are aged between 18 and 34
- The majority use it on their mobile devices rather than a desktop
- Video hosting and sharing platform
- Success of videos highly depended on content and keywords
- Owned by Google so videos show up in searches and are prioritised
- Allows you to embed videos in your website or emails
- Slightly more male users of YouTube than female
- Majority aged 18 to 34
- Owned and operated by Google and inherently linked to other Google features
- Users are largely inactive
- Layout is similar to Facebook
- Contains an ‘authorship’ tool that associates web content directly with the author
- Large variety of users because all consumers of YouTube and Gmail must hold a Google Plus account
- Allows you to stay on top of what is going on and engage with prospects and clients
- “Micro-blogging” network used to share and consume news and information and follow key people
- Engage with people in “real time” and get instant customer feedback
- Majority are aged between 30 and 50
- The gender split is fairly even
- Professional networking tool geared towards B2B relationships
- Works much like the “Six Degrees of Separation” concept where you start by connecting with those you know and who know you, and through them build a larger network for the purpose of gaining resources, finding clients, and building alliances and partnerships
- Allows you to profile individuals as well as businesses
- Marketing messaging can be very targeted to certain demographics or criteria
- Majority are aged between 45 and 54
- Higher percentage of male users
- Average income of those on LinkedIn tends to be higher than of those on other networks
- Nearly 50% of LinkedIn members have decision-making authority for their companies
How do you decide?
At the very least, your business should register and own the assets for all of these channels. You may decide to invest time into only a portion of them, but owning them secures against someone else stealing your business identity. Twitter, for instance, can be really easy setup to accept feeds from Facebook or LinkedIn and means that anything you put on those channels goes to Twitter. Instagram allows for you to share to Facebook and Twitter similarly. This means that when you create messaging you can extend the reach by sharing content across channels.
Invest most of the time available into the channels that best represent your customers and prospects.
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Still not 100% sure or want a little more strategic help with your marketing? That’s what we do!
Contact me (Jacqui Daley) and the team: 0449 845 595 or email: jacqui@themeasuredmarketer.com.au
Or admin@themeasuredmarketer.com.au
