How to Choose the Right Platform for Your Social Media Marketing

75% of people who use the internet go to social networking sites to do product research. That amounts to more than two billion possible customers.

In addition, there are over seventeen different social media platforms that you can use to communicate with your audience, so you will want to make sure that you are present wherever they are. In the “good old days,” it may have been sufficient to establish a Facebook profile and merely think, “Hey, we’re on Facebook! We have people here!” These days, people expect you to be present across a variety of platforms, as they are using them.

In addition, every social media site possesses its own particular qualities and advantages over others. Some are more appropriate than others for certain categories of commercial enterprises. The question now is, how do you decide which one is best? How can you tell if Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter is the social media platform that is most suited for you?

In this piece, we’ll go over the various steps involved in selecting the best social networking platform for your needs, including the following:

Each and every Social Media Platform is One of a Kind: A Brief Introductory Remark

Over the course of the last few years, there has been a tremendous sea change in the social media landscape. The proliferation of mobile devices, the rise of online video and live streaming, and the introduction of innovative technology such as artificial intelligence have all had a significant impact on the manner in which individuals utilize social media.

Let’s have a look at some of the most popular social media platforms before we get into the process of choosing the best social media platform for your business.

The following is a list of the most popular social media networks that you can use:

• TikTok – TikTok is an app that allows users to create and share 15-second videos on any subject using the app. These videos can be created using short-form video. It has more than one billion active users all over the world and is utilized by a number of famous people and well-known brands.

• Instagram is a free social networking platform that enables users to post photographs and short videos with one another. Image sharing, reels, live streaming, private chat, message, and “story” are the elements that are included in this post. Only Instagram Stories is used on a daily basis by 500 million Instagram users.

• YouTube is a website that enables users to upload videos, watch them, rate them, and share them with an audience located anywhere in the world. Users also have the ability to comment on videos they enjoy or find boring. The website receives more than 14 billion hits every single month, which is more than Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon, or Instagram combined.

• Facebook is a social networking platform that enables users to post material, send and receive messages, share photographs and videos, and send and receive text messages. You can also stream videos through Facebook Live, another one of its features. It boasts 2.85 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular social networking site in the world as of the year 2021.

• LinkedIn is a professional social networking service that can be accessed online as well as on mobile devices. LinkedIn focuses on professional connections. You can connect to any of its more than 830 million users, who are spread out across more than 200 countries and territories, with just a few clicks of your mouse.

The website is primarily intended for business networking purposes. Cover Story, which is one of its primary features and gives you the ability to produce a personalized video that is 20 seconds long and makes an outstanding first impression on your audience, gives you this opportunity.

• Twitter – You may use Twitter to make relationships with other people, share resources with them, and keep up with the newest news in your industry. The ability to include up to ten different accounts and hashtags in a single tweet is one of the most useful features. Twitter boasts a global monthly active user base of 396.5 million people at this time.

• Clubhouse (audio) – Clubhouse is a brand new social networking program that is completely free to use. It allows users from all over the world to communicate, listen to one another, and educate themselves in real time. It has been downloaded more than 28 million times all around the world.

• Snapchat is a mobile application that enables users to quickly and temporarily share photographs and videos. You have the option of using regular adverts, lenses (which give additional effects to photographs), geotags (which are toggled location settings), and customized filters in your advertising. It had 332 million daily active users all around the world as of the first quarter of 2022.

• Pinterest – Pinterest is an image-sharing website that enables users to target potential clients among its community of 443 users on a monthly basis. These users can be reached by sharing photos that appeal to a diverse group of people. Users are very receptive to purchasing new products, which presents an opportunity for firms to promote their wares throughout the stage of decision making.

• Reddit – Many companies find that Reddit is an excellent platform for disseminating useful information regarding their products. A survey indicated that users of Reddit who use the site for research believe the product information they discover there more than they trust information from other sites. The percentage of users who trust the information they get on Reddit was 90%.

• Quora is a question-and-answer website that enables users to solicit responses from other users in response to questions they have posed. As of January 2020, the website had more than 150 million active users and had more than 200 million unique visits each month.

There is definitely a social networking platform that is suited to your particular interests, whether you are a designer, developer, writer, photographer, or filmmaker, amongst other things.

Let’s go through some of the ways you may evaluate different social media platforms so that you can choose the ideal one for your social media marketing strategy.

How to Select the Appropriate Social Media Platform for Your Social Media Marketing Efforts: 7 Steps

1. Specify your ideal type of client.

Finding out who you want to communicate with on social media is the first step in social media marketing. To put it another way, you need to have a solid understanding of who your target consumer is and how they interact with social media.

Creating a buyer persona or an ideal customer profile is one of the most effective strategies to achieve this goal. A buyer persona is a fictional character who stands in for your ideal customer.

Creating a buyer persona will assist you in gaining a deeper comprehension of the factors that influence people’s purchasing decisions and the ways in which they interact with various forms of content across a variety of channels.

If you own a company that sells baby carriages, for instance, your ideal customer would be a woman who is now pregnant and who is due to give birth within the next twelve months.

Your ability to create content that will resonate with your buyer personas will improve in direct proportion to the amount of depth you put into developing that persona.

The following is a formula that can be used to define your ideal profile of a customer:

To get started, you need to identify your top clients. These are the people who will gain the most from your goods and services who are currently in the market to make a purchase. These individuals will be in need of what you are selling and will also have the financial means to make a purchase from you.

Finding the best customers for your product also requires figuring out why those customers are the best, such as what prompted them to make a purchase so quickly and what characteristics of both the customers and the product make them such a good match. This can be accomplished through asking questions during interviews as well as keeping an eye on the media.

Here is an example of a real-life buyer persona for a local real estate company that contains demographic information, pain points, variables impacting purchase decisions, and expectations from the product. The purpose of this example is to provide a better context.

Creating a behavioral profile of your ideal consumer is the very last stage in the process. You can make use of the information from your analytics tools as well as the customer data that is offered by your CRM.

When you have a solid understanding of your buyer personas, you will be able to adjust your messaging to meet the requirements of your ideal audience as well as the social media platform that they are most likely to be using.

For instance, if your persona is that of a “young professional,” you might decide to advertise on Facebook or Instagram due to the high probability of reaching a large number of young professionals on those platforms. However, if you also have a persona that is a “empty nester,” then that particular social media platform might not be the greatest choice for them. Instead, you might think about advertising on LinkedIn or Twitter in order to get in touch with that demographic.

2. Investigate the user bases of the various platforms with regard to their demographics.

The demographics of each platform are extremely important since they provide information on who utilizes the site and the interests that they have. You will want to select a platform on which your target audience is already present and engaged, since this will be the best option for you.

For instance, if the majority of your prospective customers are members of the millennial or Gen Z generations, your company may find more success on Instagram. It’s possible that Facebook will be more effective now that they’re older.

The following is a brief summary of the major social media platforms and the demographics associated with each one:

The majority of users on TikTok are young women.

• Users between the ages of 16 and 24 make up 41% of the total population on TikTok.

• When it comes to gender demographics, 56.1% of TikTok’s users are female, while 43.9% of its users are male around the world.

Instagram (Users Are Predominantly Young and Well-Off):

• As of the year 2022, the majority of Instagram users are members of the Millennial or Gen Z generations. 8.5% are between the ages of 13 and 17, 30.1% are between the ages of 18 and 24, and 31.5% are between the ages of 25 and 34, according to the report Global State of Digital.

• According to Statista, families with an annual income of less than $30,000 are less likely to use Instagram, but households with an annual income of more than $100,000 are more likely to use the app.

• According to a research by the Pew Research Center, of all the Facebook demographics, US users aged 65 or older climbed the most, from 26% to nearly 40% between 2018 and 2019. Facebook is primarily utilized by Millennials. The population of both Millennials and Baby Boomers grew by barely 2%. And there was a 2% drop in usage among members of Generation X.

• According to research carried out in 2021 in the United States, Millennials make up the greatest audience on Facebook, with 84% of them being active users. According to reports, 74% of people in the US who belong to Gen X utilize the site.

YouTube (Predominantly utilized by Millennials and Gen Z)

• India, which has around 225 million subscribers, is the country that has the most watchers on YouTube.

• Millennials and members of Generation Z make up the largest user base on YouTube, with 95% of US individuals aged 18-29 using the platform.

• According to Statista, 2022, 57.2% of LinkedIn users worldwide are male, while only 42.8% of LinkedIn users worldwide are female. LinkedIn is predominantly used by middle-aged men.

• A study found that by the year 2020, Gen-Z users were responsible for producing 52% of all tweets. Twitter is primarily used by men.

• Users between the ages of 25 and 34 make up the most active demographic on Twitter around the world.

• Men make up 56.4% of all users on Twitter, while women make up 43.6% of the user base.

• College degrees are held by 33 percent of all users on Twitter.

The clubhouse is mostly for the use of the male members.

• According to the findings of a study conducted by Edison Research, 15% of social media users aged 18 and older have allegedly used Clubhouse.

• According to the statistics, 66% of the users on the site are male, 56% are between the ages of 18 and 34, 42% are between the ages of 35 and 54, and 2% are 55 or older.

• According to the figures, India has the greatest Snapchat audience, with 115.95 million members as of July 2021. This is followed by the United States, which has 106.2 million users, and France, which has 24.1 million users. Snapchat is utilized primarily by young women.

• In terms of the gender breakdown of its user base, 54.4% of its customers are female. Snapchat has a male user population that is 44.6% of the total.

• In the United States, users between the ages of 15 and 25 make up 48% of the whole population, while users between the ages of 26 and 35 make up 30% of the total population.

• Research has shown that 38 percent of Pinterest users are between the ages of 50 and 65. Pinterest is primarily used by young women from the upper middle class in the United States.

• In the United States, the platform is used by 31% of adults.

• The United States of America is home to more than 86 million members of the Pinterest ad audience, followed by Brazil with 27 million.

• There are around 21 million members of Generation Z who use Pinterest.

• Women make up nearly 77 percent of all users.

• Active Pinterest users make up 45% of the population in the United States whose households earn more than $100,000 annually.

According to surveys, Reddit is the seventh most frequented website in the United States, and as of September 2020, 49.69% of its users will be based in the country. The majority of its users are males from the United States who have at least a bachelor’s degree.

Only 8% of users on Reddit are female, compared to 15% male users in the United States.

• Only 5% of people who use Reddit have earned a bachelor’s degree or above.

The majority of people who use Quora are young men who have completed their education.

• The majority of people who use Quora are between the ages of 18 and 24, and this age group accounts for 45% of the site’s overall users.

• Approximately sixty-five percent of users on Quora hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.

• 57% of males and 42% of females use Quora on a regular basis.

• Residents of the United States account for 35% of all Quora users.

• A household income of $100,000 or more is reported by 54% of all adult users on Quora.

Tools that are pre-installed on social networking sites like Facebook might assist you in developing a deeper understanding of your audience.

Consider, for example, the Audience Insights tool offered by Facebook:

It is simple to use and will provide you with information regarding the age group, gender, and areas of interest of your potential customers. Additionally, it will tell you where your potential customers are coming from.

3. Identify the brands that are already popular among the members of your target demographic.

You will be able to hone in on where your target demographic spends the most of their time online if you have an existing customer base and look at the brands and influencers that are the customers’ favorites. You may then determine what kinds of material people enjoy viewing and give those platforms higher priority when developing fresh content for your marketing efforts based on the information you gleaned from that.

For instance, if you’re interested in Instagram, you should look at the brands and people that they follow and check who they follow. Look through the newsfeeds and search histories of the people you’re attempting to connect with on Facebook and Twitter to get a sense of the kinds of content that are most likely to be liked and shared by those users.

Utilizing social listening tools, which enable you to track what people are saying about your brand as well as its competitors, is a fantastic approach to begin the research process. This will allow you to track what people are saying about your brand as well as its competitors. Using this information, you will be able to identify which platforms are the most appropriate for your marketing efforts.

Take, as an illustration, the scenario in which you are attempting to choose between Facebook and Twitter as the social media strategy for your company. You might make use of a service such as Mention to monitor mentions of Facebook and Twitter across a variety of websites and blogs by using the tool.

This also enables companies to jump into conversations and provide value to users before they move on from the topic they were initially discussing, which is beneficial for both parties.

These conversations will also help you discover what your audiences want and need, which will assist you in creating a solid social media marketing strategy. For instance, when Wendy’s made a play on Facebook’s brand update, Arby’s quickly joined in: These conversations will also help you discover what your audiences want and need.

4. Determine the locations in where your rivals are most active.

If you are looking for ideas, you should investigate the social media strategies employed by other companies operating within your sector. Check out the platforms they’re utilizing and see if there’s a consistent pattern of behavior throughout the various sites they use. You can use this information to determine which platforms would be worth investigating further.

With the use of social listening tools, you may once more determine the locations where your rival is most active. You will get a decent notion about the demographics of their followers and be able to identify the platform they are using thanks to the tools that we provide.

Once you have access to this information, you may use it to your advantage by drawing ideas from the content produced by your rivals and even by stealing their customers.

5. Select a system that is compatible with the nature of your company.

Your brand and the goals of your business should be consistent throughout all of your social media platforms. It is important to give some thought to which platform will serve your company in the most effective manner because, despite the fact that there are numerous platforms available, each one has its own own capabilities and is tailored to different sorts of content.

For instance, Facebook is an excellent platform for companies that already have a sizable fan base and for those who prioritize the development of personal connections. Additionally, it is an excellent choice for businesses that wish to communicate with their target audience by means of advertisements, posts, and other forms of sponsored content.

Instagram could be a useful tool for your company if it sells visually appealing products or services that customers can get a sense of from pictures.

One of the benefits of this situation is that you may make use of a wide variety of third-party helper tools, automation tools, and growth services to expand your Instagram Marketing efforts.

Instagram is the first social media network ever created, and if you’re searching for a place to publish videos, it’s also a great option.

It’s not like Facebook or Twitter, where the maximum duration of a video you may submit is capped at a specific number of seconds. You are able to upload videos that are up to one hour in length using IGTV. You also have the ability to add subtitles, captions, and other elements that will make your movie more entertaining for the viewers who watch it.

YouTube, on the other hand, is an excellent choice for content that is mostly video-based.

For instance, Amazon utilized YouTube Marketing in order to assist prospective clients in better comprehending the necessity of the company’s wares and services.

They were aware that in order to approach their intended demographic in a distinctive manner. Text and photos weren’t going to cut it, so they turned to YouTube to promote their e-commerce business using ingenious marketing strategies.

If video marketing is your thing, then you should look into some of the other platforms that are similar to YouTube.

Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are the three most popular types of social media, and a large number of companies choose to limit their advertising efforts just to these three platforms. TikTok, on the other hand, may be the right platform for you if you are looking to connect with a younger demographic and without spending any money in the process.

And while users in the age range of Gen Z make up sixty percent of TikTok’s user base, the percentage of users aged 25 to 34 has climbed from 22.4% to 27.4% over the course of the past few months. TikTok is obviously not only for teenagers and members of Generation Z. It is also possible to use it to communicate with an older or more experienced audience.

The most exciting part? Because TikTok is a relatively new social media network, the cost of placing advertisements on it can often be far less than those on Facebook and Instagram. For instance, if you use TikTok, you can make your video go viral or reach one thousand people for as little as four dollars!

It is now possible for professional marketers to schedule Tik Tok postings up to ten days in advance. This new feature is available on iOS and Android. In addition, TikTok Ads comes equipped with a plethora of incredible features and benefits that are not available on other platforms.

You could, for instance, run interactive advertisements that ask users to click on a button or tap on an icon that is contained within the advertisement itself.

Twitter, on the other hand, is best suited for brands that have strong personalities, such as celebrities, comedians, or other entertainers, as well as for businesses that have newsworthy text-based material that they want to post regularly with their followers.

If you own a service company, such as an accounting firm, LinkedIn is a wonderful platform for you to discuss topics related to taxes and financial planning with other members of the community. If, on the other hand, your brand is more visually appealing than it is informative and you run a huge business, Instagram may still be useful for you.

6. Take a look at your financial plan.

Before jumping deeply into the world of social media marketing, it is important to first examine your budget and the resources that will be required to get started. You should also take into consideration the amount of time you have available to maintain the various platforms.

For instance, depending on the bidding methodology, the cost of Instagram advertising might range anywhere from $0.20 to $6.70, on average. According to the findings of a recent study, the price of advertising on Facebook can range anywhere from $0.94 per click to $12.07 per 1,000 impressions.

Instead than shelling out money for paid advertisements, it can make more sense to devise a plan to collaborate with influential people in the industry. These ads typically have a lower cost and offer the feel of genuine recommendations while at the same time being less expensive.

In addition to this, you should always connect the pricey bought ads with the channels that you own such as email. You can get in touch with new potential clients through social media, and then you can cultivate the relationship with them through email.

7. Test, Your choice should be evaluated, monitored, and reconsidered regularly.

After you have limited down your options, you should create accounts on each site and then post some material to those accounts. The next step is to monitor, over a period of time, the amount of likes, comments, and shares generated by each post. You’ll get a sense from this as to what kind of engagement rate each platform generates for your company when you use it.

You might also do an A/B test to see which strategy is most successful for your company. For instance, the Exploratorium found that by switching out an image for a video, they were able to boost the number of impressions they received on Facebook.

Utilize the power of technologies that analyze data from social media to evaluate how well your actions are performing and to reconsider your choice.

The path that will be taken by social media in the future is always shifting, and new networks are consistently appearing. It is impossible to predict what will become of these networks; they may endure for a number of years or they may die out in a relatively short amount of time. Be sure to do your homework before diving into something new, especially if you’re looking at websites you’ve never encountered before.

Whoever has a choice also has to suffer the consequences!

In conclusion, there is not a particular social media platform that is universally considered to be superior to the others. Rather, the choice of which platform to use for social media marketing will depend on a variety of factors, including your target audience, goals, products, budget, and others.

It is important to keep in mind that social media is a relationship-based activity no matter what you decide. If your interactions with other people are insufficient, even the most insightful information you produce will only have a limited amount of value. Therefore, don’t forget to incorporate social into your strategy for marketing on social media!