Social media platforms - the first ones that come to mind are Facebook and Instagram. But there are a whole plethora of platforms out there that can be setup with zero to little budget to make your brand visible to your target audience.
As a brand builder, think of every social media platform as a unique way to connect with your target audience. Every platform works in its own way and has its own magic; any kind of cookie-cutter shortcut approach won’t yield optimal results.
In order to assess which social media platforms are best for your brand, let’s first take a look at the main platforms’ audience profiles;
Facebook: With ages 25-55, Facebook has the largest audience of all the social platforms and the most robust advertising platform, most likely increasing sales from ad campaigns.
Instagram: Ages 18-34, highly visual, best platform for influencers and brand trust, more popular with younger generations than Facebook. (Ads done on Facebook)
TikTok: Ages 16-24, specializes in short-form content, great for influencers with a low budget and to run ads with their internal ads platform.
Pinterest: Great for driving traffic, far more women on Pinterest, highly visual, lot’s of interest in décor, food, art, tablescapes, fashion, wedding, travel.
YouTube: 21% of its global audience are aged 25 - 34, 17% are aged 35 - 44. With over 2 billion active monthly users and 5 billion video views daily, building a YouTube channel for a brand is not an option, it’s necessary. A study recently even indicated that 70% of viewers bought a brand after seeing content on YouTube (in the form of ads, product reviews, etc.).
Linkedin: Ages 25-34, for service-based businesses who want to build relationships with high-tier positions at companies, as well as run ads using their ads platform. If your business is targeting corporates, this is a fantastic tool to connect with them.
Twitter: The largest demographic is 25 - 34 years old (29%). However in Malaysia, Twitter isn’t a strong tool for a brand to grow sales. Malaysian users view Twitter as a news source for current affairs and politics. If your business is within this sector, it would be a worthwhile avenue to explore. However for the sake of creative industries, Twitter is not a high priority social media platform to focus your resources on.
We’ve put together a quick guide by industry type that might help you narrow down your choices:
Once you’ve figured out the content creator part, it’s now vital to look at your content strategy (which really warrants a blog post on its own!). But here’s a checklist of often forgotten-about things that should come in handy:
I realize all this may be a lot to take in, so feel free to re-read this a few times as you process your next steps. Also remember to work smart and repurpose your content for multiple platforms.
I know I said at the start that every platform needs to be looked at individually. What I mean by “repurposing your content”, is take a look at what you’ve created for Instagram and see how you can adapt it for Facebook, TikTok, etc.
I’m going to leave you with a little exercise:
Think about your next campaign - a new product launch, a new menu item launch, restocking of your start product, etc. Create your checklist of operational visuals you’ll need (menu, product and price list/catalogue). Then think how you can repackage these operational visuals into content for an IG post and a story. From there, think about how you’d translate this to Facebook - expand on the visuals, because Facebook users tend to have longer attention spans. And then keep going down your list of social media platforms, using these same set of visuals. Once you’ve covered all your social media platforms, that’s your master checklist of content to create.
It may seem very task-oriented, but once the checklist is out of the way, then the fun begins with the content creation. From here, look at apps and websites to use that can help manage content across multiple accounts - Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Zoho Social, are just a few social media management tools that are worth exploring.
Enjoy the process!
-Nikola
