How to select the right social media site for marketing your business

In today's digital world, maintaining a strong social media presence is crucial for any business. Establishing a strong identity on social media sites increases your brand's credibility and reach, thereby increasing the number of potential customers. But trying to cultivate large audiences and develop the same level of eng

agement on every social media site is a foolhardy task. You will end up spending substantial time and effort without reaping the expected rewards.

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That's why it's better to target a specific site, or two, and focus all your efforts into establishing a strong presence there instead of maintaining a sub-par presence on multiple sites. Here's how you should go about identifying which social media site is right for your business:

Identify your target demographic

Every business has a different target demographic which yields the most customers. For example, Nike Football's customers tend to be young males while a cosmetics company like Lakme has exclusively female customers. It's important to establish a niche and then research which demographic is most likely to use or buy your services and products.

Find where your potential customers spend most time

Once you've identified your customer base, the next step is to figure out which social media site they spend most of their time on and focus your efforts on building credibility on that site. If your potential customers are over 50 years of age, it would make sense to stay away from sites like Instagram and Snapchat, which are more popular among younger internet users.

Select a site that best matches your content

Selecting a site that best matches the content you plan to post will help propagate said content in a more effective manner. Image-centric businesses like travel and photography fare much better on Instagram than on Twitter, while business-related content would gain more traction on LinkedIn than on Facebook. It's important to remember that you don't have to restrict yourself to only one site. Fashion-related businesses, for example, should target Pinterest, since most of its users are frequent online shoppers, along with Instagram and Facebook.

Identify your goals and do what works for you

The site you select also depends on your goals. Do you want to increase sales or just awareness? Do you simply want to increase traction to your blog or bring relevant people to it? The social media sites you select will depend on the answers to such questions. If your brand focuses on a small niche catering to a select customer base, using unconventional social sites like Reddit, Quora, and Medium can be highly beneficial as compared to the mainstream powerhouses.

Similarly, if sales matter to you more than awareness, stay away from the likes of Snapchat and Twitter and focus more on Facebook. Also keep in mind that a social media strategy that works for a similar brand as yours may not necessarily work for you. If you've selected a site and find that isn't working for you even after a few months, don't hesitate to ditch it and try something else instead.

Finding one or two sites that can check off all these criteria is an improbable task. But it's certainly possible to narrow it down and then begin experimenting to find the best fit. Trial and error is key for marketing your business on social media, and as the saying goes, ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’