The Social Dilemma

In the world of social media, it's easy to get overwhelmed with the opportunities for messaging. Does your brand have a presence on the major social media channels?

More importantly…. Should you?

When it comes to Social Media, more is not always more. You need to effectively reach your targeted audience where they are and when they want to be found. A little bit of foresight and strategy can save you a lot of wasted time and energy in the long run.

To make it real simple- here are two important questions you should ask yourself when deciding what social media channels to invest your resources into:

1. Is my buyer here?

2. Will my product/service perform well on this platform?

To help answer the latter question here is some oversimplified info for each channel. Keep in mind your brand needs to evaluate each channel specific to your offerings.

Facebook is the platform default channel for most businesses and organizations. Simply having a Facebook page serves to legitimize your brand identity from a user perspective. However, keep in mind that organic reach is less than 6% and engagement is down 50% since the algorithm changes in January 2019. Focus on creating content your audience wants to see from you. Post quantity is no longer as effective for reaching your followers.

Twitter is particularly good for customer service-oriented brands. It’s instrumental for brands that need to be reactionary in real-time to numerous customer issues and comments. It’s also a great platform for news sources, or other brands focused on targeting specific interests or topics. Twitter requires more frequent and timely content.

LinkedIn is a great platform to reach other professionals. In fact, there are more users on this channel than Twitter. Are you selling to other businesses or working with other organizations? If your answer is yes, then chances are, your brand should be here. If your brand is B2C or I2C, you might not want to waste your time here.

Instagram is not just a place for pretty food. It’s also a place for pretty home goods, beauty brands, and other retail products as well. It’s a highly visual platform that sees the most engagement from its users over any other social media channel. Find a way to make your product or service visually engaging or else skip this channel altogether.

Pinterest is also a highly visual platform. This channel offers a unique element of being able to organize your business or organization into boards. Pinterest users are more apt to be looking to buy within the platform as well. It also generates some of the longest life of posts out of all of the platforms.

Snapchat can be powerful for driving brand recognition but it’s not easy to get users to find you. There is no link to reference like other social media channels have in order to send to people, nor can it provide the depth of analytics like other channels. The stories feature is one way for brands to touch audiences, and that same feature has now been copied to Instagram and Facebook.

So, what’s the bottom line? Do the things that you are going to do WELL.

Social media is a powerful tool with great ROI, but it does require the constant deployment of resources so you need to be purposeful in your approach.

Don't waste your time, money, and energy on channels that don’t make sense and reallocate those resources to the ones that do.

Now that’s #winning.

Wondering where TikTok is? You may be interested in my unpopular take on it.