The first rule of thumb when you're trying to find the best social media
platforms for your business is to be where your customers are. I know this
sounds kind of generic and it would be pretty cheesy if I just stopped there
but there IS an actionable way to find out which social platforms your
customers prefer and I'm gonna try to show you how you can do that inside this
video.
Hey this is Chia from Brand24 and today I want to talk about how to find the best
social media platforms for your business - and by "best", I mean social platforms
where people are talking about - or looking for - products and services like
the ones that your business offers. So, ideally, you would start by tracking
online mentions of your brand. Now, tracking your brand mentions and the
platforms they're coming from shows you directly which websites your customers
like to use. BUT, obviously, tracking online mentions of your brand only works
if your business is already somewhat known, at least enough so that people
actually talk about it every now and then. So, if you're not quite there yet
you can still use this method to find the best social media platforms for your
company, except instead of tracking brand mentions, you will want to track online
mentions of your product, service or niche. For example, if you specialize in
hiking shoes, you would track online mentions of keywords like 'hiking shoes'
'hiking footwear' and 'hiking boots'. Actually, this is something that you
definitely want to do, even if your business already generates mentions on
its own. Tracking relevant mentions apart from your company or brand name is
a really good way to discover even more social media sites for your business
which brings us to the second rule of thumb: Make sure your brand is on more
than one social media platform. So, not everybody likes to consume content the
same way; some people prefer watching videos on YouTube, some like reading
articles or blog posts, and there are those you know they just want to listen
to podcasts. The same goes for different platforms: while one segment of your
audience may prefer Twitter, another might spend more time on YouTube, while
your biggest segment may actually end up coming from a forum like Reddit or
Quora, and that's why you want to make sure
your business is on more than one social media platform. Now, if you create your
own content - don't worry. I know that content creation in any
form is a super, super time-consuming process and I'm NOT suggesting that you
spend all your time trying to create different content for each platform.
Instead, you can try re-purposing the content you already have. So, if you
record a good YouTube video, you can strip down the audio and turn it into a
podcast episode. Or, take that same video, transcribe it, add some images and turn
THAT into a blog post. These are just some of the basic ways that you can
repurpose your content to build social media presence on more than one platform.
Now, you can definitely get creative and find other ways to reuse a single piece
of content but that is a topic for another video. So, after you've started
monitoring your brand mentions or mentions of your product or service, you
can analyze the data and find out which social media platforms are the best one
for your business. So, I use Brand24 for this, so I'll show you what that looks
like from there. This is the project that we created earlier, tracking mentions of
'hiking shoes', 'hiking footwear' and 'hiking boots', remember? Now, to find the best
social media sites for a business that specializes in hiking footwear, I would
go to "Sources". Since we're interested in the websites that these online mentions
are coming from, we can click on "Pages". "Authors" will show you the people or
influencers who are talking about your hiking shoes in general, which is also
really important but not the topic of this video. Inside the "Sources" tab, you
have a list of all the websites where hiking shoes are mentioned, with the
number of mentions from each site and how often the website is visited. So you
can filter the data you see, based on the number of mentions for each site. In
terms of where people talk about hiking shoes, our top three social media
platforms are, of course, the big three: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Twitter
is a really significant source of these conversations, especially if you compare
it to Instagram. Even though both websites have a comparable number of
regular visitors, people on Twitter have mentioned hiking shoes roughly 10X
more often than those on Instagram. And you can also monitor specific hiking
brands, like Merrell or Keen, and see where their top sources of mentions are. These
websites could also work for YOUR brand. Otherwise, it looks like you want to
prioritize the social media presence of your brand on Twitter, especially since a
good chunk of those tweets are likely from potential customers asking for
advice on which shoes to buy. You can join the conversation by recommending your
own brand of hiking shoes, but only if you see people who are really looking
for the types of shoes that you offer. Otherwise, you're just going to come off
as annoying and get written off as spam. And this is just a really general and
quick look at how to find the best social media platforms for your business.
Start by tracking your brand mentions or monitor online mentions of your product,
service, or niche. And look at the data to find out which websites are the top
sources of online mentions for your business, and that is where you need to
build social media presence. So, that's it for today. If you have any questions, let
me know in the comments section below. And if you found this video helpful, feel
free to like it, share it, or subscribe to our channel to get a notification when
the next video will be ready, which will have even more tips on how to do all
things in social media and digital marketing. Thanks for watching and I hope
you learned something new. I'll see you next time. Bye!