Do you Know Which Social Media Is Best For You? 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.

 

Facebook

FacebookNotably 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:

  1. Location – you can be as specific as your own city if you are a brick and mortar and are targeting the local market only.
  2. Age – Let’s say your ideal customer is 40 and over, you can see what percentage are users of Facebook in your local area.
  3. Language
  4. Education
  5. Work
  6. Home
  7. 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.

 

Twitter

TwitterA 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.

 

PinterestPinterest

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.

 

InstagramInstagram

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?