In a world where a large chunk of our time is spent on social media sites, it’s no longer a question of whether to market your businesses there. A much more important question for marketers, when there seems to be a new social media app popping up every year, is “which platforms should I focus on?”
Let’s be honest, if you’re reading this then you’re likely looking for some advice on your digital marketing ventures, and a significant part of digital marketing is the social media management. But this, on top of everything else can be very time consuming, taking you away from what you’re best at – providing an important and product or service.
So, in this week’s Framework Marketing blog post, we’re going to dive into what each platform does the best and whether it is suitable for your digital marketing strategy because, if we’re frank it’s all well and good that these social media sites have millions of pairs of eyes on them every day, but what difference does this make if none of those eyes are interested in seeing what you have to offer?
It’s tempting to go wholesale on every social media site in order to cast a wider net of possible lead generation, but we’d advise caution towards this “strategy” and err towards cherry-picking the platforms that best suit your particular brand and the ways in which this brand can be marketed online.
Before setting up all those logins for Pinterest, Snapchat, Insta, and Reddit, take some time to think about what your brand does best and whether it works well for the individual services that each of these – very different – platforms provide.
For example, Pinterest and Instagram both rely heavily on visual and video content and both are quite far reaching in the variety of content that is posted there, but where the Meta-owned Instagram is an all-round experience that provides image and video content, it also integrates a social element akin to its sister company Facebook through the use of messaging and Stories.
On the other hand, Pinterest’s USP is that it acts as a kind of ‘digital pinboard’ where you can search and save ideas based off of images and visual content found around the internet.
Stretching this example even further, another visual-based app Snapchat has entirely different purpose in that it is largely an picture-based messaging service (although has in recent years become a place for news and other digital content). It enhances selfie culture and applies it to messaging with friends and family through the use of filters, digital avatars, gifs, and much more.
So as you can see just from these three – relatively small – social media sites, there is plenty of nuance between them which is why it is so important to consider which ones to IGNORE just as much as the ones that you should pay attention to. We’ve touched on the visual-heavy platforms and their unique selling points, so let’s now move over to the more multi-media, all rounder apps that incorporate text and see what they offer.
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Let’s start with the biggest and most important ‘all-rounder’ platform – Facebook.
Although, Facebook is largely becoming a multi-media platform that provides video and image content on top of solely text-based content, it is also multi-faceted in its purpose and use to users. Once the groundbreaker of social media and social networking, it has since branched into services that span – well just about anything you can think of, really.
Despite being a platform for meme groups largely, Facebook has firmly stuck to its roots of being an impressive social networking website that has kept its near 3 billion users connected to friends and family all around the world.
However, it is also a significant digital marketing platform for your business. Facebook is great for lead generation and its advertising platform can be highly customised to target specific audiences. Because it has kept with the ‘social’ aspect of the social media site so well, Facebook allows you to see the ‘human side’ of your business which then allows you to turn leads into followers and eventually customers. Video is greatly popular on Facebook, with its Live and Stories function performing well amongst users due to its interactivity.
Do you want your brand to make friends with Facebook? Contact us at socials@frameworkmarketing.co.uk to see how we can help.
A similar, but no less important platform that sits atop of the social media wealth mountain is Twitter. Twitter is a similarly powerful tool for its users but more as a news aggregation site in which news and voices from its 300m+ monthly users across the world come together to create a message board of ‘tweets’ surrounding pop-culture, local or global news, work or brands.
In this way, Twitter is a powerful social networking tool and search engine in which its users can find the latest information about any topic you wish. Thus, a marketing strategy around Twitter should be around creating and publishing content for your audience of followers which should lead to more followers and – naturally – more leads and sales.
So as you can see, there is a whole host of ways that you can use the spectrum of social media sites to your advantage for your marketing strategies, and hopefully you should also know a little more about what each site achieves via its own USP and how your marketing strategy can utilise this uniqueness to sky rocket your sales further than you ever would without them.
Still don’t think you’ve got the time or resources to create the best social media strategy for your brand? Leave it to the experts.
Framework Marketing is a national digital marketing agency that helps companies grow further than they could ever imagine. Interested in knowing more? Get in touch here!
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