Selecting the right social media platforms for your business can feel overwhelming. There are many platforms to choose from, each with features, quirks, and an audience to learn and understand.
You may initially decide to set up accounts on all channels to protect your brand before deciding which ones to invest time, effort and money.
If you set up “dormant” accounts, add a bio that communicates this to your audience in case they stumble across your page or profile.
Choosing Your Social Media Platforms
Here are a few steps you can follow in choosing the right social media platform for your business:
Target Audience
Aim to be visible and engage on the social media channels where your target audience is most active.
Your audience may use multiple platforms, research which ones they use the most and which align best with their aspirations or the problem you solve.
Some natural matches exist, yet your research may show your audience behaviour is different from what you might expect so keep an open mind.
Audience Trends By Social Media Platform
Due to its longevity, Facebook has a broad user base.
Facebook is great for engaging with people with shared interests or passions.
The critical trend has been younger users adopting newer platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok. In comparison, older users stay sticky on the platform.
Instagram is perfect for brands with visually appealing products.
Instagram has a younger audience than Facebook, but it is maturing with the platform, which faces fierce competition from TikTok for younger audiences.
Twitter is great for breaking news, sports and other brands where real-time engagement is of value.
Twitter tends to have a slightly younger user base than Facebook and Instagram; however, things are very volatile after Elon Musk’s takeover.
We recommend a wait-and-see approach before investing heavily on the platform.
TikTok
TikTok is still relatively early in its social media journey.
It has built a young audience but is maturing fast as its rapid growth continues.
One of the challenges of TikTok is the audience is national or even international for your content, which can make promoting local or geographically constrained businesses more challenging.
Be Realistic With Your Time & Resources
The more platforms you commit to, the more time & effort are required to create content, manage engagement and monitor results.
The need to create video content for some platforms can also increase
the time and resource investment required for content creation.
We recommend starting small and focusing on just one or two platforms first. There will be plenty of time to expand to other platforms once you get consistent results.