Which Social Platforms are Right For You and Your Business?
When you invest money into something, you usually expect returns.
You study the market, assess the opportunity, and decide whether it’s an investment worth making.
Social media works in much the same way. Yet, most people who invest time and money into creating and publishing content, don’t think enough about the returns. They don’t consider whether their investment is worthwhile. They’re happy to invest resources into being active or present on every social platform that’s available. But if you want your time spent on social media to be a good investment and give you valuable returns, you need to be as discerning with your choice of platform as you would be with your money.
Essentially, define what you want in return – outline your objectives, identify which target audience you need to communicate with in order to achieve them – then choose an appropriate platform to achieve those goals.
To do this, it’s important to understand how each platform works and what audience is prevalent there, so you can gauge if it’s a worthwhile investment. Here’s an overview of the major social networks and what they’re good for:
Best for: Targeted and paid ad campaigns
Facebook is a great place to target paid content to a well-defined audience, so it’s perfect for businesses that want to push product or service awareness, trials and purchases. It also gives you detailed insights into how well your campaigns are performing, offering brands the opportunity to understand their audiences’ interest, motivation and behaviour well.
Best for: Selling products or services, influencer marketing
With its inbuilt shop feature and visual-first approach, Instagram is one of the most popular platforms to showcase and sell products or services. It’s also one of the most effective channels to leverage influencer partnerships or marketing sponsorships, and build community.
Best for: Business networking, thought leadership
LinkedIn is the unrivalled leader of professional social networks. The LinkedIn algorithm rewards consistency and quality in publishing content. Unlike other popular social networks, engagement is not an end goal, it’s only the tip of the iceberg! Building valuable connections, establishing yourself as an industry leader, sharing your professional accomplishments and having your career profile easily available to recruiters or peers makes this platform a powerful tool for career advancement.
If you aim to generate leads – whether that’s B2B or B2C sales, industry leadership positions, speaking engagements or industry awards – LinkedIn is where you need to be.
X (Previously Twitter)
Best for: Catching up with trends, customer service
If X is abuzz, you know something’s going on. X has been through a turbulent rebranding since it was bought by Elon Musk (even losing more than 15% of it’s users), but loyal users still regard it as the place to be to observe global developments in politics, business and entertainment, while also sharing your views on them. It also offers a unique space to hold conversations with influential people and celebrities.
YouTube
Best for: Video
Education, entertainment, motivation – you can find long- and short-form video content on any topic under the sun on YouTube. Individuals generally aim for monetisation of their videos, so longer-form content works well to meet the channel’s minimum requirement in watching hours.
Businesses have been using YouTube in a variety of ways. Organic content usually includes product demos, education, community building and content marketing. Paid advertising on YouTube is generally more expensive than on other social networks because of the higher multimedia production costs involved.
Podcasting Platforms
Best for: Community building, thought leadership
Though the most popular podcasting platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts don’t strictly qualify as social networks, we can’t leave them out of this list because audio is one of the fastest growing and potent media formats available today. Podcasts are a great way for businesses to establish the calibre of their leadership, and for individuals to network with high-profile guests as well as establish their authority, knowledge & expertise.
Every social platform has a unique approach to content and audience retention, but they’ll only show results when you make the effort to take a unique approach to each. Your success on these platforms will depend not only on your content, but also on your engagement strategies, understanding of the algorithm, and data-backed approaches.
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