Almost every business shares in the same struggles – limited cash flow and access to top talent. Unless you are an international company with the money of Google, or Apple helping you to attract and retain top talent or pay for advertising, you are probably wondering how to find the time, energy and money to devote to social media marketing.
Don’t panic and stop stretching yourself too thin. Just because there are as many social media sites as there are Dalmatians doesn’t mean that your business has to be on all of them. Each platform has its own demographic, so you really only need to be where your demographic is most engaged. Thankfully, we had our social media marketing team shine a light on which platforms are the right ones for your company.
Back in the day, it was almost guaranteed that if you had a pulse and a heartbeat you were probably on Facebook and your grandma was too. For many people, Facebook was the gateway social platform, but it is not all that popular amongst the younger generations anymore. Under 10% of Facebook users are between the ages of 18 and 24. If your demographic is squarely in that category, it may be best to focus your efforts elsewhere. However, Facebook has a huge amount of users in other age groups, so it may best to create and monitor a company page just so that you have that presence.
Snapchat
If you have a fresh young brand and want to hit a younger demographic, then you should probably get on your phone right this instant and figure Snapchat out. Why? Because the platform has well over 100 million users, eating up over 30-minutes of content a day and 60% of the Snapchat audience is under 24. It’s a marketers dream! As an added bonus, there still aren’t a ton of local companies taking advantage of the platform, so the audience isn’t completely turned off by branded content yet.
Instagram is still the darling of marketers throughout North America right now. The mobile app can boast over 500 million followers which is a feat unto itself, with over 50% of users still logging in and checking the platform daily. Yes, the platform moved from organizing the feed in chronological order to one that uses an algorithm, but there are ways around it, like taking advantage of stories that will help your business stay at the top of the feed. Many social media marketers in Calgary still rely pretty heavily on this platform to get the local message out.
While the professional networking platform doesn’t have the type of reach that others do and users don’t check it as often as Instagram, some professionals and companies have found success with it. LinkedIn is all about the demographic. Lots of B2B (business to business) companies have used the site to boost their brand awareness and sales by using LinkedIn’s ability to target an incredibly precise corporate audience.
Unless you are a news company, a hyper-local brand or personality or an internet troll, you are not going to get a great return on investment through Twitter. For most of our clients, our advice tends to be to not waste your time with this one. It may change in the future, but for now, Twitter is probably not where you want to be investing a lot of time and energy. Sure, you can link your facebook account to it, but we even advise against that because it looks sloppy and can turn people off.
Social media can be such a powerful weapon for your marketing efforts – if you are smart about it. If you feel like you’re just treading water without actually going anywhere with your social efforts, we can help! Get in touch and chat with our social media marketing team about helping you out!