choosing the right social media platform for your business

Pro Tips for Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business

Imagine social media as a crowded sea, and your target audience as a specific type of fish you want to catch. Just like a fisherman needs the right bait and strategy to catch the right fish, you need an effective social media strategy to reel in your desired audience. 

In our previous post, we discussed the steps to take to build an effective social media strategy. A crucial component of that is understanding your target audience and this includes knowing where to find them. Although every social media platform has all kinds of users based on different demographics, the distribution of users varies from platform to platform. Certain age groups dominate others on a given platform. And certain types of content receive more engagement than others on a given platform.

In this post, we’ve highlighted some data-driven facts that will help you find your desired audience on the largest social media platforms in the world today. Having this information not only helps you get the best social media ROI but allows you to manage your resources better.

Facebook

Facebook, the OG of social media, boasts a vast and diverse user base. With over 2.8 billion monthly active users, it’s a hub for connecting with friends, family, and like-minded individuals. The demographics are broad, spanning multiple age groups, making it suitable for a wide range of businesses.

Demographics:

  • Age: A significant presence across all age groups, but particularly popular among 25-34-year-olds (31.2%), 
  • Gender: 43% female, 57% male
  • Time spent per day: 33 minutes
  • Location: Global reach, with significant user bases in the United States, India, and Brazil.

User Behavior:

  • Users engage with a mix of personal updates, news, and entertainment content.
  • They participate in groups and follow pages aligned with their interests.
  • Video content performs exceptionally well, particularly live streams and engaging short videos.

Content Engagement:

  • Image and video posts that tell a story or evoke emotions tend to perform best.
  • Interactive content like polls and quizzes often receive high engagement.

Marketing Strengths:

  • Best for building brand awareness and engaging with a broad audience.
  • Effective for creating and sharing content, running targeted ads, and fostering community engagement through groups and pages.
  • Excellent for businesses seeking to connect with a diverse demographic.

Instagram

Instagram is all about visual storytelling and is particularly popular among younger demographics. It’s a platform where users showcase their lives and interests through captivating images and short videos.

Demographics:

  • Age: Predominantly used by 18-24-year-olds. (30.8%)
  • Gender: 48.2% female, 51.8% male
  • Location: Highly popular in urban areas.

User Behavior:

  • Users scroll through image-heavy feeds and stories, seeking inspiration and connections.
  • Hashtags are crucial for content discovery and engagement.
  • Instagram Shopping features allow for direct product discovery and purchase.

Content Engagement:

  • High-quality, aesthetically pleasing images and videos are essential.
  • Stories, reels, and IGTV videos are effective for engaging users.

Marketing Strengths:

  • Ideal for businesses with visually appealing products or services.
  • Great for storytelling through images and short videos.
  • Influencer collaborations and sponsored posts work well for product promotion.
  • Strong platform for reaching younger, more visually-oriented demographics.

YouTube

YouTube is the second-largest search engine and a content haven for video enthusiasts. Users come to learn, be entertained, and explore a vast array of interests.

Demographics:

  • Age: Popular across all age groups, with a significant presence of 18-35-year-olds (highest reach)
  • Gender: 51.4% female, 48.6% male
  • Time spent per day: 45.6 minutes
  • Location: Global reach.

User Behavior:

  • Users actively search for content related to their interests.
  • They engage with content through likes, comments, and shares.
  • Subscriptions allow users to stay updated with their favorite channels.

Content Engagement:

  • High-quality, informative videos that cater to niche interests tend to perform well.
  • Tutorials, product reviews, and how-to guides are often highly engaging.

Marketing Strengths:

  • The go-to platform for video marketing.
  • Best for creating and sharing high-quality video content, tutorials, and product demonstrations.
  • Effective for long-term content visibility and building a subscriber base.
  • Appeals to a wide range of demographics, especially those looking for informative or entertaining videos.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the place for professionals, job seekers, and industry leaders. It’s all about building a professional network and sharing industry insights.

Demographics:

  • Age: Largest age group 30-39 (31%)
  • Gender:  43% female, 57% male 
  • Location: Worldwide reach with a strong presence in the United States.
  • Time Spent: 63% of LinkedIn users access the network weekly, 22% daily

User Behavior:

  • Users engage with thought leadership articles, job postings, and industry news.
  • Building professional connections and networking are central activities.
  • Content that adds value to their careers and businesses is highly appreciated.

Content Engagement:

  • Long-form articles, industry updates, and thought-provoking posts perform well.
  • Engaging in discussions and commenting on relevant topics can boost visibility.

Marketing Strength

  • Ideal for B2B marketing and connecting with a professional audience.
  • Valuable for sharing industry insights, thought leadership, and job postings.
  • Effective for building professional relationships and networking within specific industries.
  • Best for businesses targeting a professional and career-oriented audience.

X

X (formerly Twitter) Twitter is where real-time conversations happen. It’s the go-to platform for trending topics, news, and bite-sized discussions.

Demographics:

  • Age: Largest age group – 18-29 (42%)
  • Gender: 34.1% female, 61.29% male
  • Location: Popular worldwide with a strong presence in the United States.
  • Time spent per day: 34.8 minutes

User Behavior:

  • Users actively participate in discussions, often using hashtags to join relevant conversations.
  • Sharing news, opinions, and quick updates is common.
  • Twitter is also a platform for engaging with brands and influencers.

Content Engagement:

  • Short, concise tweets and visually appealing media perform well.
  • Engaging with trending topics and responding to user inquiries can boost engagement.

Marketing Strengths

  • Great for real-time engagement and discussions.
  • Ideal for promoting trending topics, news, and time-sensitive content.
  • Effective for quick updates and engaging with influencers.
  • Appeals to a broad demographic, especially those interested in current events and trending topics.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual paradise for those seeking inspiration and planning. It’s particularly popular among women and those looking for creative ideas.

Demographics:

  • Age: Largest age group-  25-34 (28.5%)
  • Gender:  76.2% female, 17% male, 6.6% unspecified
  • Location: Significant presence in the United States.
  • Time spent: 14.2 minutes per day

User Behavior:

  • Users actively browse through pins to discover ideas for projects, events, and more.
  • They save and organize pins into boards based on their interests.
  • Pinterest’s visual search feature allows users to discover similar items by image.

Content Engagement:

  • High-quality, visually appealing pins and infographics perform well.
  • Providing ideas and solutions for users’ projects or aspirations is key.

Marketing Strengths:

  • Perfect for businesses with visually appealing and creative products.
  • Valuable for providing creative inspiration and project planning.
  • Effective for promoting products through visually appealing pins and boards.
  • Particularly popular among women and those seeking ideas for DIY projects, home decor, and fashion.

What next?

Understanding the unique strengths and user behaviors of each platform is essential for developing a successful social media marketing strategy. Depending on your business goals and target audience, you can choose the platforms that align best with your objectives and tailor your content and approach accordingly.

With MevNet Studio’s social media marketing services, you can be sure of a social media marketing strategy that is tailored specifically to your business and drives consistent revenue and growth.

Ready to take your business to the next level with social media? Contact MevNet Studios today and let’s get you going.

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How to Build a Social Media Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

Have you been active on social media and still aren’t generating enough leads for your business? Well, you thought right – social media marketing (SMM) is much more complicated than most people think. But, it doesn’t have to be. 

Social media marketing is crucial in today’s business world and can be a great way to drive business growth; if done properly. Yep; it requires a lot of time and effort. But, most importantly, it requires an informed strategy that is ideal for your business. 

A good social media marketing strategy is the bread and butter for attracting new followers, driving traffic and generating leads and revenue for your business. With the explosion of content and competition across the numerous social media platforms we have today, having a strategy for SMM will ensure you stand out and avoid efforts that do not serve your business goals. 

A social media marketing strategy is a structured plan to engage, target, and convert your audience effectively on social platforms. The specifics of a social media strategy will look different for every business. However, in this post, we’ll walk you through the essentials for building an SMM strategy that works for any business. 

Step 1: Set goals that align with your business objectives

It all begins with setting the goals you want to achieve with your marketing tactics. These goals must align with your business goals and objectives. These of course will change over time. For instance, a small local business looking to build a digital presence, its goal can be to increase local brand awareness and community engagement. Whereas for a larger enterprise looking to scale, its goal may be to build a national audience. Other social media goals include generating leads and sales, providing customer care or driving traffic to your site or onsite stores.

For whatever your goals are, they have to be S.M.A.R.T: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. SMART goals provide metrics that allow you to track your success. The ‘SMARTer’ your goals are, the more likely you will achieve them.

Step 2: Define and Understand Your Target Audience

There are 4.8 billion social media users globally. Your business is relevant to only a portion of this massive audience and you need to determine who they are and what they want. You need to know where to find them and how best to engage with them.

Your audience is real people with real needs. Although it’s impossible to factor in the uniqueness of every individual, defining your audience involves creating buyer personas or customer personas. A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. Defining buyer personas enables you to execute a social media marketing plan that targets them specifically. For instance, the target audience for a weight loss brand may differ from that of a beauty and high fashion brand. There may be some overlap, but there will be more differences than similarities. 

A buyer persona consists of a number of factors such as demographics (age, gender, marital status, location, children, income, and education); job title or industry; values and fears;  goals and challenges etc. 

Some of these factors, especially demographics, account for the particular social media platforms in which you can reach them. If your audience is a younger generation, you are less likely to find them on Facebook and more likely to find them on Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok. The type of content that drives higher ROI differs between these platforms. 

Step 3: Know what your competition is doing

Your audience is not the only people you need to study. You must investigate what your competition is doing and not doing on social media. Since you have the same audience, understanding how they have engaged with your competitors provides valuable insights into what you should include in your social media marketing plan. 

A competitor analysis will provide insight as to who your competition is, how your audience has engaged with them, as well as their areas of weakness. By identifying these, you will know where to optimise your content. For instance, if certain types of content have shown higher engagement rates, then you know what to focus on. Again, if your competition is more active on Instagram and less active on TikTok, provided there are potential customers on TikTok, you can capitalise on this information by ensuring you have a stronger online presence on TikTok. 

Step 4: Create Engaging and Strategic Content

All your research and fact-finding will mean nothing if you do not post great content. We have already provided some tips on figuring out what great content should be. Identifying what your competition is posting about doesn’t mean you have to replicate the exact post. Customers love authenticity! However, if your competitor has been successfully using short Instagram to advertise certain services, then short reels may be to go as well. Find the balance.

As to the actual content, you must be intentional about what you are trying to say to your audience. This is where a content strategy comes in. A content strategy is like a roadmap – it outlines what to post, when, and why, to engage and connect with your audience effectively.  A common mistake businesses on social media make is to focus more on promotional content. We want to sell and only sell. But we forget that social media is meant to be social. 

There should be a balance between content that engages, informs and promotes your products and services. Marketing experts recommend the 80:20 Rule. That is, 80% of your content should educate, inform and entertain your audience while 20% can be to promote your products and services. Some break down the 80% into 50% for engagement or entertainment and 30% for keeping them informed. This may however be varied or broken down further. It comes down to understanding the needs of your business at a given time while balancing the interests of your audience. 

Step 5: Create a social media marketing calendar

Managing social media platforms can be really demanding and a huge part of succeeding at it involves being organised. Your audience craves a steady diet of engaging content. A content calendar ensures you serve them regular, delectable bites, keeping them coming back for more. Items to consider include the creation of content, reviews, posting schedule, response to customer engagement and so much more. A content calendar helps you manage it all.

By posting when your audience is hungry for your message, that is, at peak engagement hours, you will be able to maximize your reach and impact. Like most content creators and social media managers, inspiration is not in constant flow. Having a content calendar that details all you intend to post within a period, you have a varied menu of flavoursome content that your audience can consume. 

Step 6: Track performance and adjust where necessary

The world of social media is very volatile and there’s no telling what will happen. Monitoring and evaluating your social media campaigns is necessary. By evaluating your engagement insights, which shows the reach of your content, you will see what worked and what didn’t. Various social media platforms have different metrics that track how users engage with posts. By analysing the data provided on engagement with your posts, you can make necessary adjustments where necessary.

Sometimes, certain posts do not do as well as expected not because your audience preferences have changed or because you didn’t understand them well enough. Rather, it may be due to changes in the algorithm of these platforms. The algorithm used determines what pops up on the feeds of your audience. Typically, you cannot look up exactly what the algorithm changes are, so it means you need to analyze each and every post and see if a pattern develops that indicates a change has been made.

Take Action

Investing in social media marketing can be the next best decision you will take for your business. As your business grows, your social marketing strategy will evolve and become more complex. Although it seems like a lot to deal with, it’s a worthwhile puzzle to unravel. But it doesn’t have to be an issue. With MevNet Studio’s social media marketing services, you can be sure of a social media marketing strategy that is tailored specifically to your business and drives consistent revenue and growth.

Ready to take your business to the next level with social media? Contact MevNet Studios today and let’s get you going. 

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What Social Media Marketing Is All About and Why It Is Important for Your Business

On average, every human spends approximately 900 hours a year on social media platforms; that’s over 5 weeks of uninterrupted scrolling, clicking or sharing. While this may seem like a lot, global social media penetration is only at 54% (that is about 4.2 billion users). One thing we can be sure of, these numbers will keep growing; exponentially. Statistics like these tell us how much social media can influence not just our online activities but our offline activities as well.

Social media is indeed a powerful tool that can influence customer behaviour; unlocking boundless opportunities for your business. It therefore becomes imperative that every business that wants to thrive in today’s digital economy must harness the power of social media to drive business growth. And there is no better way to do this than through conscientious social media marketing (SMM).

Social media marketing is simply using social media platforms to promote your brand, products or services. It significantly differs from traditional marketing which makes use of conventional channels such as print, broadcasts, billboards, direct mail etc. Social media marketing offers a wide array of advantages that can be a game-changer for your business. 

For one, SMM allows you to increase your brand visibility far more than any traditional marketing channel would; without breaking the bank. With over 4 billion active users, social media enables you to reach not just customers within your region but around the world; allowing you to compete with big international brands. Through creative and engaging content, you can convert these users into customers. 

And when these customers are secured, you can ensure their loyalty through consistent engagement. Unlike traditional marketing channels that only allow you to talk ‘at’ your customers, SMM allows you to talk ‘with’ your customers. By responding to comments and enquiries and engaging with user-generated content, you create a sense of trust with your audience and turn your customers into brand ambassadors. Overall, this helps humanise your brand by giving it a persona which you can further humanise through behind-the-scenes content showing your process and the people behind it. 

Social media marketing also offers targeted advertising options, allowing you to reach a very specific audience which forms your potential customer base. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow businesses to specify their target audience based on demographics, interests, behaviours, and more. Also, by harnessing the data generated by the engagement of your audience on your social media posts, particularly audience demographics, businesses can draw valuable insights that can enable them to optimise their marketing strategies.  

As free and easy as creating social media accounts may be, a solid social media marketing strategy requires multiple platforms, a mix of organic and paid methods, research and careful planning to bring it all together. This can become resource-intensive, and while it’s a good problem to have, the more you grow your audience using social media, the harder it will be to keep up. Hiring a social media marketing agency like Mevnet would allow you to focus on your core business functions while still unlocking the full potential of this powerful medium. 

Our social media marketing associates at Mevnet Studios understand the principles and practices of effective social media marketing and can help your business unlock new levels of growth through bespoke digital marketing strategies. 

Ready to boost your social media presence? Let’s get started. Contact Mevnet today!