Page 138 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Where do you invest your marketing dollars if you don’t know whether a specific
social platform is going to be around in a year or two? Similarly, how do you know
which up-and-coming social platform your users are going to gravitate toward
after a major social platform starts fizzling? Knowing which social platform is
going to have explosive growth next and where your customers will spend their
time is not always easy. Nevertheless, you must try to answer those questions.

This chapter helps you identify the right combination of social platforms on which
to launch, sustain, and promote your brand.

Before marketing on these social platforms, you need to figure out your social
voice. See Chapter 5 for more information on how to do that.

Choosing Social Media Platforms

The first step in choosing the best platform for you is to recognize that no single
social platform is going to be enough for your SMM activities. It’s extremely
unlikely that your potential customers use only one of the social platforms exclu-
sively. In fact, research shows that a user is rarely on only one platform. Your
customers are far more likely to have profiles on two or three social platforms and
to use some of them more than others. Furthermore, you have to assume that your
consumers will invariably gravitate from one social platform to another as time
passes. For example, whereas Facebook may have the greatest scale, the sharp rise
in usage of Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, and WhatsApp shows how
fickle consumers can be.

You’ve probably also noticed that marketing on several social platforms isn’t that
much more expensive than marketing on one, as long as your energies are focused.
Choosing a few social platforms versus just one to do your marketing makes sense
if you can reach different audiences in different ways at different points in the
marketing funnel through each one.

Still, the question of where to focus remains. You can’t be marketing on every
social platform — Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, hi5, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram,
Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Meetup — all at one time with
the same amount of effort. Although SMM is considered relatively cheap, your
efforts still take time and money when you’re on many social platforms at one
time. (You’re probably going to confuse customers who are on several of the social
platforms, to boot.)

The answer is to put a lot of effort into marketing on a few social platforms where
your customers participate the most and to have lighter presences on the other
platforms.

122 PART 3 Reaching Your Audience via Mainstream Social Platforms