Go where your audience is
This is a basic of marketing, digital or not. For example, If you are selling custom hunting bows, you wouldn’t advertise in the Vogue magazine. Instead, you will analyze the reader demographics and psychographics of each magazine to determine which magazines will allow you to best reach your target audience. This same process should be used for determining which social media platforms you should focus the majority of your efforts on.
The infographic below from Social Barrel analyzes the audiences that frequent ten of the most popular social media platforms to help you decide where you should focus your efforts.
Most Suitable Media Types By Platform
To help you understand what to post on these various social media sites, this infographic explains which types of media are most suitable for each social media platform. The infographic breaks down the relevance of photo, video, article, and text posts for each site to help you determine which types of posts will most likely resonate best with your target demographic.
What are Your Objectives?
Not only is it important to understand where you audience is located, you also must set goals for what you wish to achieve with your social media efforts. One of the sections of this infographic breaks down the likelihood for a social media platform to achieve four different goals:
- Improve SEO
- Increase traffic to your site
- Increase brand exposure
- Improve customer engagement
For example, Google+, StumbleUpon, and YouTube are the best platforms to focus on if your goals lean towards improving SEO, while Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are great at driving traffic to your website. Check out the infographic below to see how all the platforms perform.
Finding Your Target Demographic on Social Media
If your main objective for social media is to reach the largest community, you will definitely want to focus on Facebook. But, don’t forget that a large community does not mean an engaged community or a community of potential customers. Try not to focus only on the size of the community, but also on the potential to convert those community members into customers or brand advocates. This infographic details the age, gender, education, and income demographic information for each platform to help you determine which ones most closely match that of your target demographic.
