Social media marketing is crucial for many businesses, but it can be difficult to select the right platforms with so many options available. From Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and TikTok, there is a wide variety of platforms to choose from for marketing and advertising. While many businesses may opt to target as many of these social media sites as possible, this strategy is highly inefficient, particularly if your audience isn’t on them and they won’t help you meet your goals.

Choosing the right social media platforms will help ensure your marketing dollars don’t go to waste and that you reach the right people at the right time. To help you get the most from your social media marketing strategy, the following are some tips to help you identify the ideal platforms for your business.

Consider What Type of Business You Run

One of the key determinants when it comes to selecting a social media platform to target will be the kind of industry behind your company. Specifically, you’ll want to choose platforms based on whether your business is a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) company. If you want to connect with consumers, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are a few of the best platforms to target with ads and posts. Meanwhile, B2B businesses will want to network with and target professionals on a platform like LinkedIn. However, both verticals can benefit from posting video content on YouTube, which is invaluable for both B2B and B2C businesses.

Identify Your Audience

Based on the type of business you run, you can determine which type of audience yofkeywordu want to target. When identifying your audience, you need to get very specific as this will help you figure out how best to target your audience. Keep in mind that you may not have a single solitary audience—you might have multiple segments you’ll want to target with different campaigns and content.

When pinpointing your audience, consider a variety of factors. For example, think about who your typical customer is, including their age, gender, income, education level, hobbies, and overall lifestyle. You can use all of this information to develop personas for each segment of your audience that function as fictitious representations of them.

One example of a buyer persona could be one named Student Samantha, who represents a segment of a B2C audience comprising female college students. This persona would have an entire personality and narrative to go along with it, which would help you decide on the right messaging and creativity to reach this segment on social media and other platforms.

Set Specific Goals to Achieve With Your Campaigns

You must also have clearly defined goals to succeed with your social media marketing strategy. Otherwise, you won’t know what to measure and use to gauge your success. Your goals should be realistic, achievable, and measurable to help you achieve the best possible results with your strategy.

To begin setting goals, you can start by answering a number of questions, such as:

• Do you want to increase brand awareness?
• Do you want to boost sales?
• Do you want to attract new app users?
• Do you want to bring existing customers back?
• Do you want to improve communications with customers?

Your answers to these and other questions can help you determine which goals to set and measure. If you have these goals in place from the start of your campaigns, you’ll have a clear direction to take them and help you succeed.

Look at What Competitors Are Doing

Before developing your own content or selecting a platform, it also helps to look closely at your top competitors. Try to find your competitors on social media and see what channels they’re using. Additionally, you should figure out what type of content they post attracts the most engagement. Once you pinpoint which platforms and content are performing the best for your competitors, you can take cues from these competitors to start developing your own campaigns.

Choose the Right Social Media Platform to Reach Your Audience

With your audience identified and goals set, you can begin selecting the ideal social media platform to help you meet your goals and establish a connection. To choose the best platform for your business, look at the demographics of each platform and what types of audiences use them. In addition, you need to find out how active your audience is on each platform. For instance, while many younger audiences may have profiles on Facebook, they may be more active on platforms like Instagram or TikTok.

The following are the different platforms available to you and the types of audiences who use them.

Facebook

As the oldest and most widely used social media platform, Facebook has around 2.8 billion monthly active users at this time, making it one of the most consistently reliable platforms for business. The age groups that use this platform the most include individuals between the ages of 25 to 34 years old.

Audiences use Facebook primarily for building relationships and reaching out to old friends and family. This is why it’s great for earning the trust and loyalty of your existing customers. On the other hand, it’s often difficult for businesses to reach new audiences on Facebook because of the large number of users that can limit the reach of your ads and posts.

Generally, if you’re considering using Facebook to target your audience, you should only do so if you want to build a loyal following and want to keep your mobile business top-of-mind among audiences. If your goal is to acquire new users or customers, other platforms may be more ideal.

Twitter

Twitter is another big platform that enables businesses to reach billions, boasting 187 million daily active users. Like Facebook, the most active age group on this platform is individuals between 25 and 34 years old, which compose 28.9% of users. Twitter also has a primarily male audience, with around 70% of users consisting of men and 30% composed of women.

Twitter is great for building brand awareness, largely because of the popularity of the hashtag that enables content to easily go viral. Hashtags help organize conversations around a particular topic, compressing it into a brief phrase or word. You can search for industry-related hashtags that are worth posting about through your profile, or you can engage in existing conversations. In the process, you’ll get your brand name out there while actively participating in compelling conversations.

Twitter posts also frequently wind up in the news or blog posts, giving you the chance to expose your brand to those audiences beyond Twitter.

LinkedIn

If you want to target professionals in a variety of industries, LinkedIn remains the best B2B social media platform, with over 690 million members. Most of its users are in the 30-49 age range, with an even mix of male and female users.

People frequently use LinkedIn to look for jobs and connect with other professionals and brands. This makes LinkedIn a great resource for generating B2B leads, recruiting new employees, and networking within your industry.

Instagram

For businesses that want to produce and share more visual content, Instagram is a great platform to use for images and videos. Today, the platform has over one billion active monthly users, with the average user spending more than 53 minutes per day viewing content on Instagram. Again, the majority of users on this platform are 25 to 34 years old, but many older and younger audiences are also active on this platform.

Because of the emphasis on visual content, Instagram is best suited for businesses in the food, retail, beauty, and art and design industries. This platform is also great for generating leads through Instagram ads due to its reach, which is wider than Facebook’s.

YouTube

With more than 2 billion active monthly users, YouTube is a solid platform for reaching people through engaging video content. It’s especially great for reaching adult audiences, with 74% of adults in the U.S. alone using YouTube on a regular basis, while Facebook reaches 68%. The biggest age group among users is 15-35 years old.

YouTube is owned by Google, which means the two platforms are interconnected much like Instagram and Google. YouTube is now one of the biggest search engine platforms, giving you the chance to increase organic rankings with video content. You can post a wide range of content, from video ads to “How To” guides and other educational videos.

TikTok

Is your goal to reach younger audiences with video content? TikTok is useful for many businesses if they want to produce and share short-form video content. The platform has more than one billion annual users, the majority of whom are between 19 and 29 years old. Similar to Instagram, businesses will benefit most from this platform if they’re in a visually-oriented industry such as food, fashion, or beauty.

Make Sure You Have the Right Resources

All of the social media platforms listed have their own audiences that are compatible with many businesses. Depending on your goals, industry, and audience, you can find which platform your audience is on and target it. However, to ensure your social media campaigns succeed, you need plenty of resources and tools available.

App Samurai can help you develop successful social media campaigns by giving you the tools you need in a comprehensive mobile growth platform. Using this innovative solution, you can target your campaigns and effectively acquire new users and customers for your mobile business.
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by Cansu
zAppSamurai