Optimizing your brand through social media marketing is key to success for small business in today’s ever changing way of marketing your business to grow. Face it if you’re not involved in this aspect for marketing your competition will pass you by.
The question becomes which venue do I use, there are several and each has its unique benefits and market reach. Let’s look at some of the more popular ones and see where they fit into your demographic of potential customers.
Notably the most popular with well over 1 billion users sharing over 2 billion pieces of information every day but are they within your audience? About 54% of Facebook users are Female, In Canada and the US about 60% of them fall between 18 – 44 years of age.
If you’re looking to maximize your Ad reach in Facebook, they have a great tool in their business area called “Facebook Audience Insights”. This tool will provide you with the trends of potential customers across Facebook by looking various elements for example:
- Location – you can be as specific as your own city if you are a brick and mortar and are targeting the local market only.
- Age – Let’s say your ideal customer is 40 and over, you can see what percentage are users of Facebook in your local area.
- Language
- Education
- Work
- Home
- Market Segments
These are just a few but you get the idea. If you are going to spend some of your advertising dollars with Facebook do some research and make sure you’re getting the best bang for you buck.
Keep in mind straight sales pitches are not the most successful, content that contains images and encourages interaction will have greater engagement than simple text.
A blogging site limiting your message to 140 characters, providing followers to use “Hashtags” to post and track by topics of interest. With over 500 million users the largest growing group falls into the 55 to 64 years of age group.
As with Facebook they provide various tools to help in setting and identifying your target market whether it be geographical, age or language.
Key is again engagement and type, photos have the most retweets and give you the opportunity to exceed the 140 character limit if you add text to the images.
Pinterest
Similar to an online Scrapbook, it allows users to pin images and links based on their interest. With almost 80% of its users being women Pinterest is growing and becoming a major contributor to online traffic. In the United States much of its content is geared to recipes, decorating and fashion. As an image based media Pinterest provides the perfect doorway to an e-commerce website.
Instagram
As with Pinterest it is image based whereby friends can share photos instantly. Owned by Facebook, Instagram gives you the perfect opportunity to elevate your image postings and increase engagement.
Do you use more than one platform for social media and did you pick it for its popularity or does it meet the demographics of your target audience?
I use all the platforms you described, some more than others. When I started out, I chose Facebook & Pinterest as both more favorable to image posts. Now I’m doing those & Twitter & Ig. We like making graphics as a way to communicate our brand and our beliefs.
That is the one big benefit with images you can say a lot more, especially if your message is product driven.
I use all of the platforms in your post Joe with the exception of Instagram because it does not tie up with my work. Instead my first platform is LinkedIn and then the others because that is where my client hangs out for professional work closely followed by Facebook and I maintain a presence on G+ for SEO purposes.
Pinterest interests me because much of my work is done with lady professionals and I have noticed a number of my colleagues from LinkedIn joining it with no gender discrimination. Call it a way to show I am around on all major platforms.
The numbers are general and if you audience is in one platform or 2 you go with what works. Exposure in others helps if the trend changes.
I focus on facebook and twitter right now – will be making changes to business, so waiting to jump into other channels. Surprised to see the age demographics for facebook and twitter; I’ve heard they are reversed from the stats you include.
Depending on the geographic regions you look at you will see changes, especially if you look at different countries. The numbers I looked at are for the US & Canada.
Right now Facebook and Twitter but as regularly as I’d like. LinkedIn as well.
Good to hear!
As a highly visual person, I find it interesting that I have not ventured into either Pinterest or Instagram and seem to favour both Facebook and Twitter. Neither of the target audiences you mentioned they attract are my ideal market, although if twitter is now 55-64 than perhaps I would be wise to relook at my strategy there. I have been growing my followers rather organically on Twitter and the same on Facebook. I found these stats very interesting and surprising and appreciate your up-to-date information very eye-opening., Joe. I immediately asked myself “why” would Twitter attract an older audience, as I believe it started as a platform that attracted a much younger audience.
Twitter is growing in this older group because they don’t need friends to voice an opinion. You can join in on any conversation in Twitter,what ever interest you it’s easy to follow along.
I use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but almost everything I do right now is for social interaction so I do not keep myself buried in academics. 🙂
Those 3 give you a wide coverage in social media circles.
Hi Joe,
I usually prefer to use Facebook, Twitter and Google+ most as I found the best engagement on these social media platforms 🙂
Awesome post!
It’s important to only use the social media platforms that work for you and not waste time trying to be on all of them. Glad to hear you’re getting good engagement on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Great info! I think that choosing suitable social media for your business is very important and you shared great info! Thank you so much!
Glad you enjoyed the post!