Choosing your platform
You should also take notice of which platforms these companies are concentrating on and which get the most followers or interaction. Usually, a company creates a following on one or two platforms, and unless you can employ a social media manager then this is what you should be doing also. Facebook and Instagram are the two huge platforms that many companies use, but if you find that all the companies you are studying that are relevant to you are on Pinterest or Twitter (and getting a lot of interaction on there) that might make you rethink your platform. Pinterest allows you to create virtual pin boards of other people’s posts which attracts people looking for ideas – such as a creative person planning a home renovation. Twitter is popular with business professionals because it’s quick, allows for short posts and is very much in the moment. This is why Twitter is excellent for live events where you can be pumping out updates in real time using an event hashtag, meaning everyone else following the event will get to see your updates even if they don’t follow you. I once helped a company who only had 12 followers on Twitter get a Tweet seen by 12k people when they were at a tradeshow, simply by using the right hashtags, creating a brilliant image and tagging in the event promoter who re-tweeted it on their official account.
Which platform you choose will come down to, in part, your personal preference. But it should also come down to what you discovered your customers use the most when you researched them. Demographics plays a big part here: for instance, Instagram is most popular with under 30s and has a slight lean towards female users, whereas Pinterest is very popular with 30-50 age range with the majority of users being female.
But as a small business you will get better results from being wildly successful on a single platform than you will from spreading yourself thinly across three. You can use social media tools to create one update which is then re-shared across all your social media platforms, but it’s a poor way of creating interaction. If you are using a re-posting app you won’t be regularly logging onto your different platforms. People might be replying to your Tweets and getting ignored, and different platforms deliver posts in different ways. For example, Instagram doesn’t (currently) allow for links in your posts unless you are paying for advertising, so if you’re simply copying your Facebook post that links to a product or an article it simply won’t make sense. It also means that if your social media activity is going to rely heavily on sending people to specific pages on your website then Instagram isn’t going to work as well for you – you will have to direct people to a link in your biography and hope they go hunting for the page you want them to visit, or use a third-party tool such as Linktree.
So if you are going to do social media, pick which platform or platforms you know you can do well and use that as your focus. That might mean using the sites that you use the most yourself, because you are already spending a proportion of your time there and are more motivated to be active on it. As your company and resources grow you can expand your social media footprint. But if a customer finds one of your social media channels and it only has a handful of followers and no recent activity then this is not good for creating confidence in your company.
