The most common social platforms used are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube for advertising. Sometimes, the social channel that you think you should use is not the most efficient channel to achieve your goals, or you have been using a platform for a while that just isn’t getting the results you were hoping for. You might be left wondering how one would decide which social channels are the best. Don’t fret, if you keep reading we’ll break it down for you.
What is your big goal?
To figure out which channel is the best to use, you must investigate your goals. Are you trying to spread awareness of your brand? Do you need to drive more sales or leads? Would you like to drive more traffic to your website or to your physical location? Where does most of your traffic come from now? These are important types of questions to answer before deciding which social channels will be most beneficial to utilize.
Now that you understand what you want to achieve by advertising on social media, you move on to building, testing, optimizing, and growing!
You’ve answered all of your tough questions, you know what you want to achieve, but you’re still wondering which platform is right for you. How’d we guess? Well, we’ve created a guide on different social media platforms and how you might utilize them to expand your market and grow your business.
Facebook:
- Goals: Increase followers, promote events, promote products, spread awareness
- Best to use if your target audience is not in a niche (very narrow) industry
- A good platform to use if your business has multiple locations and promotes a lot of in-store events
Instagram:
- Goals: Create brand awareness, increase networking, promote products and sales
- Best to use for any target audience or industry
- This should be in addition to other social platforms, most people use Instagram as a validation tool to know you are a legitimate business
LinkedIn:
- Goals: Networking, increase leads, create and engage in conversations, B2B Growth
- Best to use if your target audience is in a niche industry or holds a specific type of position
- A great option for posting informative articles, building credibility, driving new website traffic, and gaining leads
YouTube:
- Goals: Create a sense of community, solve customer problems, show expertise in your industry, increase leads
- Best to use if your business is in a service type industry
- Good platform option to inform people in a unique and memorable way, build credibility, and grow your following
Let us guess, you have goals that fall into more than one of these categories? You don’t have to feel like there’s only one option for you. Most businesses post and advertise on multiple platforms to achieve different goals!
