Rather than having a presence on every social media platform out there, it’s more beneficial and less time- (and resource-) consuming to focus on a couple of platforms. The key is to find out which platforms your audience favour and focus on these. Unfortunately, there’s no quick tool or analytics programme that can tell you this, so it requires a bit of research.
The first and most logical place to start, is with your ideal clients. Asking them where they hang out online is pretty basic and an easy way to do this is to create a short list of questions, like their favourite social platforms, where they typically share content and where they connect with their friends, colleagues and community members. Then reach out to around ten of your existing clients – the loyal ones who you can trust to give you honest feedback. Call them directly or email them and request a chat so you can ask your prepared questions. Use these answers to guide your social media marketing strategy.
Next, you could try a survey. To collect data, set up a brief and to-the-point survey and send it out to your audience. You are more likely to get valuable answers you can use if you keep the questions simple, i.e. with yes/no answers, or provide lists of multiple answers that can be checked.
Find websites that are similar to yours and do some competitive research. You can use a search on Google, by typing your topic + blog, or your topic + podcast and see what comes up. Make a note of every website that relates back to your topic and check them out. You can also use BuzzSumo for competitive research, to see a list of the most shared posts on a particular topic, from a variety of websites. Once you have a comprehensive list of competitor websites, you can alter your search on BuzzSumo by entering the domain name and seeing the top five posts from that site. It will display the social data from each post. After doing this for five to ten of the websites on your list, you should see trends emerging.
Once you have an idea of which platforms are the top performers, research the actual social media platform, to make sure it’s a good match for your customer’s preferences and views. Look at typical demographics as well as the features of the platform – e.g. if they are highly visual or more content heavy, like Pinterest vs LinkedIn.
Once you have decided which social media platforms to build a presence on, run tests to check your results. Trends change over time, as do the interests of your audience, so it’s a good idea to immerse yourself in the platforms you have identified, but check after six months or so, to make sure you’re getting the results you want.
If you need some assistance in determining the platforms your audience are on, contact us. We’re pretty savvy when it comes to social media and online marketing and we make sure we keep up with the trends.