How to: Identify social media platforms that are best suited to your business

We’ve compiled our top 5 things to consider when choosing a social media platform to ensure they align to your goals, brand positioning, and the time commitment required to effectively manage the platform.

1. Get to know your audience: Who are you trying to reach? Why does your product or service matter to them? Where do they spend most of their time online? Understanding your target audience is crucial in choosing the right social media platforms. Think about their age, location, and what they're into. This will give you valuable clues as to which platforms they're likely to be active on.
   
2. Set your goals: What do you want to achieve? Do you want to increase awareness of your brand, drive traffic to your website, engage with customers or boost sales? Maybe all of those but not necessarily at once? You need to be clear about what you want to do, and in what order. Different platforms offer different features and functionalities, so pick the ones that can help you reach your specific goals and will align to your business message.
3. Explore different platforms: Each social media platform has its own quirks and characteristics. Take a look at popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok. You want to check out each platform’s user demographics, levels of engagement (likes, comments and shares) and the types of content (photos, videos and text) that have high engagement on each platform. This will give you an idea of which platforms are a good fit for your business and how to use them effectively.
4. Find your competitors: What are you competitors doing on social media? Which platforms are they active on? What sort of content are they posting? How are they engaging with their audience? You can use what they’re doing as an inspiration to guide your own platform choices or help guide you to develop your point of differentiation on these channels. If they're finding success on certain platforms, it's worth considering them for your own business.
5. Test and adapt: You don’t have to be perfect from the start. Begin by focusing on one or two platforms that seem like a good match for your business and your target audience. Create some content that fits in with our business ‘story’, see how people respond and interact and if you start attracting followers. Keep track of the performance of these posts over a month and analyse how you continue to improve performance to reach your goals. Which content and platforms are delivering the best outcomes or results? Be open to adapting and adding new platforms as you go along.