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How to choose social media channels for your brand

by | Business, Marketing

Many factors go into having a successful social media strategy: audience, timing, content, and consistency are just some of them. However, long before thinking about the strategy, every brand (personal or commercial) must know which social networks are best for them. To answer, you can ask yourself the following questions as a starting point.

What is your business model?

It is not the same as a brand of professional services such as marketing, agency, or lawyers rather than a D2C (direct-to-consumer) brand of cakes, swimsuits, or sunglasses.

The B2B (Business-to-business) or B2C (Business-to-consumer) nature can define the networks or strategies that will most effectively establish relationships with your potential client.

LinkedIn has always been the quintessential choice for doing B2B business, but networks like Facebook have also proven effective for certain industries. Therefore, when answering this question, you should not rush to make a decision. It will simply be one more point of information to decide after answering the other questions.

Types of Business Models

Source: Shabarek (2013) 

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Demographics

Interests

Buying preferences

What is the profile of your client?

We must have a defined buyer persona (avatar) for any business, a marketing term that defines our brand’s ideal client or clients. What are you a B2B? So, you create a company persona (also called a corporate persona)

In another post, I will give you tips to define a robust buyer persona. The important thing here will be to have the greatest amount of details about the online behavior of our target:

  • What networks do they use?
  • When do they use them?
  • What do they use them for?
  • Are they a user of Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.?
  • Do they listen to podcasts?
  • Do they watch traditional television?
  • Do they listen to the radio? Online radio?

These are just some of the questions that we must answer to define a successful strategy.

Think of it like this: if we don’t know what kind of things our target does in insert-the-name-of-any-network-here, we won’t create content that generates engagement with them. So this is one of the most important questions.

What role will networks have for your brand?

It is not the same if I plan to sell my products or services directly from my Instagram account or only have my LinkedIn profile to give corporate information.

One thing we must understand is that each network serves a specific purpose for each brand uniquely. We cannot think that we can make them serve all of them with the same goal.

In the past, I’ve had clients who use YouTube in a purely instrumental way, as a repository of videos that can then be disseminated on different digital media. Or customers who only use Instagram as a showcase for their services, while the sale is made through the commercial team.

All this illustrates is that there is no single formula that applies to each network. It also serves all types of accounts, which is excellent news, so we have more room to experiment and differentiate ourselves from the competition.

Create Community

Customer Support

E-Commerce Conversion

Where is your client located?

If I mention the name Snapchat to you, what do you think? If your answer was something related to the following words: disused network, dead, nobody uses it. Well, look at it again from another perspective.

In the report for the first quarter of 2020, it not only surprised investors for good but also showed unexpected growth in the number of recurring users of the platform’s exclusive shows.

Also, keep in mind that according to the latest data from DataReportal, Snapchat saw a growth of more than 15% in countries like India, Mexico, and Colombia in the number of users. So if you were to do business in any of those countries or in countries where Snapchat is still resilient like the US, France, and the UK, you should definitely not dismiss it as an alternative.

The important thing is that you always take into account the cultural and technological nature of your audience. Not all age groups work on the same networks; even, soon we will also publish a post about the profile of the user of each social network so that you can use it as a guide in choosing the mix of channels for your brand.

Conclusion

The correct choice of social networks for a brand will directly impact the engagement of the publications and the conversions that you will achieve through them. But even more important is that it will allow you to optimize the resources (human and financial) you allocate to community management and digital marketing tasks. On the other hand, a good social media strategy will always improve any social ad campaign’s performance, which will also lead to an increase in ROI (return of investment) or return on investment.

Definitely, everything is a wheel that feeds on the good or bad decisions we make in digital marketing. Share this post with whoever you think may find it useful, and do not hesitate to contact us if you feel that you may need advice in the design or execution of your social media strategy.