When you’re using social media marketing in your business, there are a lot of challenges. One of the biggest challenges of social media marketing for businesses is knowing which platform or platforms to focus on.

Trying to focus on everything isn’t a good strategy, but you also don’t want to be so narrow in your focus that you’re potentially giving up opportunities.

So what’s the right approach? How do you know which platforms you should be putting most of your attention toward?

Know Your Audience

The most important piece of information that you can keep in mind when it comes to anything in marketing is to know your audience. If you already know your audience well, this should give you some direction as far as where to focus your social media work.

If you don’t know your audience, it’s going to be tough to figure out where they’re hanging out online.

Along with knowing your audience and where they’re spending most of their time, you want to know how they’re interacting with the platforms they’re using.

What’s the content they’re most often looking for? Are they content creators, or do they use the platform passively? What are the types of accounts they follow?

What Are Your Goals?

Another broad concept that’s going to play a role in your social strategy is what your goals are.
Every platform is going to have its set of benefits.

For example, if your brand is very visual and you want to focus on exposure as a result, maybe TikTok or LinkedIn is right for you.

On the other hand, maybe you’re primarily B2B, and you want to position yourself as an authority and go-to resource in your industry. If so, you might gravitate more toward LinkedIn than other platforms.

Some of the goals you could consider include:

– Improving your customer service by giving customers another way to reach out with questions, concerns, comments, or complaints. Social media for customer service presents a tremendous opportunity to connect with your audience in a deeper way and to provide on-demand service, which is something customers have come to expect.

– You could use social media primarily as a means to identify leads and prospects, particularly when they’re similar to your current most loyal customers.

– Another general way to use social media is to reach new audiences who could be potentially interested in or receptive to your services or products.

– Your goals may be as simple as increasing brand awareness.

– You could already have specific, measurable goals in mind, like increasing sales and traffic to your website.

Think About the Content You Already Create

A lot of what’s going to drive your decisions as far as where to focus your social media marketing is going to be based on the content you’re already creating.

If you’re a company that’s highly technical and most of your content reflects that in the form of long-form whitepapers or something similar, you’re probably not going to find that Instagram is the right platform for you.

Compare the Most Popular Platforms

After you have a good idea of your goals and you know the general type of content that you most often produce or that works for your business, you can start to compare the platforms.

– Facebook for Business is the biggest platform with billions of active, monthly users. Facebook can work well for lead generation and showing a more human element of your business. The advertising platform can also help you target your content to very specific audiences. There is some talk that Facebook’s popularity is waning, however. Younger users aren’t as drawn to the site as they once were, which depending on your targeted audience, is something to consider.

– YouTube for Business has around two billion active users, and nearly 75% of adults in America watch videos on the site. YouTube is the second-most used search engine after Google.

– Instagram has more than 1.2 billion users, and around 500 million active users look at Stories on the platform every day.

– If your focus is or could be on interactive media, TikTok has around 100 million monthly active users just in the U.S. The audience on TikTok is primarily Generation Z. Brands are really just starting to experiment with using TikTok.

– Twitter can be helpful to some companies, especially if you want to share things in a timely way.

Twitter can also be a good option if one of your goals is to use social as a way to provide customer service and connect directly with your audience. A lot of people go to Twitter to directly Tweet at brands, or they can direct message them.

– If you’re an eCommerce company, Pinterest can be a valuable platform. Pinterest is also good if your business is well-suited to creating visuals. The feeds are photo-based, and you can link directly to your website or product pages in your posts.

– Discord is a quickly growing platform that was once primarily where gamers went to connect with one another. Now, there are around 150 million monthly users, and it’s increasingly becoming a popular way to communicate with audiences. Discord can be compelling from a business perspective if you want to build a community. You can create hundreds of channels at a time, and then your audience can find what they’re looking for. Discord can be a tool for brand awareness built through word-of-mouth marketing.

Finally, Reddit is a social platform that you shouldn’t overlook. Reddit has a feed that’s always updating, and there are 50 million active daily users.

The best way to market using Reddit as a platform is to create content that users feel is interesting and valuable. You can answer questions, get involved in discussions, and create content that’s specifically geared to the platform.

Don’t try to use every social platform. Instead, find one or maybe a few that are in line with what you want to achieve. You might eventually expand from there, but it’s better to do one thing well than a lot of things poorly.