Picking the Best Social Platforms for Your Business

Whether you are a small business of 1 or have 10-plus employees, it can be challenging to keep up your social media presence. Perhaps you haven’t even started and are curious about which platform is right for your business. The best approach to determining which social platform your business will get the most out of involves considering a few key questions.

Questions to Ask Yourself

• What are your main competitors doing? 
• What platforms do your target audience use most often? 
• Is your product or service visual? 
• How much time do you have to create, edit, and schedule posts?
• Do you have someone to engage with customers and prospects daily? 
• Is your brand’s tone of voice professional, quirky or somewhere in between?

Not all social platforms are appropriate or valuable for every industry. For example, a property management company would likely have an easier time creating visual content for an Instagram page compared to a technology company that might just have platform screenshots to share. 

Understanding what you can do with what you have, in terms of your product/service, is the most important question to ask yourself when determining how to allocate your marketing resources for social media. 

Allocating Your Time Wisely

You have decided that running at least one social channel will be integral for your business, but is one enough? In theory, yes. If you have selected a platform that reaches your customers in a manner that is easiest for them, then you might be safe with just one social page. This is especially true if you focus on the quality of your content, rather than scrambling to adapt posts’ formatting for different channels. 

For most businesses, the more versatile platform will be Facebook. 

With a Facebook Business page, you can increase brand awareness by actively posting and being responsive to reviews, recommendations, and comments. Features that are useful to business owners include, but are not limited to, posting Events, Jobs, and Services. Facebook essentially offers a spot to include all the information you might have on your website, for free, on its platform. 

In short, if you only have time for one platform, make it Facebook and fully commit to consistent posting and customer interactions. 

But is One Social Page Really Enough?

If you have time for one, adding a second to your plate isn’t too challenging if you pick a platform that has similar capabilities to your primary page. For example, Facebook owns Instagram so cross-posting is as simple as checking off a box. Both are visual and have sizable character count limits. The tones expected of business on both platforms are also flexible, you have free rein to express personality if desired. 

A less compatible addition to your Facebook efforts would be Twitter. This is because if you had a long post you would have to edit it down to 280 characters for Twitter. Another example of platforms that might be too different if you are crunched for time is LinkedIn and Instagram. LinkedIn has a more professional tone for networking and career-relationship building whereas Instagram is more casual. 

There are ways to make social media content planning more streamlined if you decide to really dive in and tackle multiple platforms; this involves scheduling tools. In some cases, you will need to keep in mind that the best scheduling tools come at a price.  

Tools that Make Posting Simpler

Perhaps you decide to fully maintain Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages for your business. As previously mentioned, it is much easier to adapt posts between certain platforms and less so for others, so when tackling an arsenal of social media a third-party tool is beneficial. 

Two that are free, under certain circumstances, include Hootsuite and Buffer. These tools help businesses schedule social media posts, alter posts to the proper tone of voice for different platforms, and sometimes, help select optimal posting times. 

If your business has multiple locations and you have different pages on the same social media platform for each, you may want to consider a subscription to a more robust tool. Sprout Social is one of the best tools on the market but does come at a price due to its extensive metrics reporting, social listening, trend tracking, and versatile publishing tools.   

Content and Conversions

As the major social platforms continue to shift and alter their algorithms to favor individuals over businesses, organic reach has diminished. Businesses can be producing great content that should get plenty of engagement, but that is no longer a given-in if posts aren’t getting prioritized in peoples’ feeds. 

That is not to say that organic content isn’t worth the effort. It is. 

Client relations, competitor monitoring, and social listening are just a few of the reasons that businesses should continue to produce content for their brands. If you create engaging content and include a link to your website, you also increase your chances of having users click and convert. For Instagram, since the links are not clickable in posts, you can utilize a free tool like Linktree where your business can house links in your profile. Another way to increase conversions is through participating in paid social media marketing.  

A Case Study: RXBAR

RXBAR’s primary product is a nutritional snack bar without artificial ingredients -- “No B.S.”. In addition to their primary product, they offer a Kids version (pictured below), quick oats, and nut butter -- all of which have the ingredients listed transparently on the front of the packaging.

Photo: Bridget Kunz, 2019

RXBAR maintains Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages. These three platforms make sense for their brand as they can create visual content through quick videos, announcements of new flavors, sharing of user-generated content (UGC), and so on, on these visual pages. The Tweet below shows UGC and a partnership with Target.  

Photo: RXBAR on Twitter

The company also maintains a LinkedIn presence for the sake of its employees, but it only publicizes Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook on its website. This helps indicate to customers that these are the best avenues for interacting with the brand. 

All in all…

Selecting the social media platform(s) that is right for your business resources is a matter of honest reflection. Ask yourself the questions stated at the beginning of this blog. Once you have decided which platforms are best for you and your clients, research what type of content resonates best which each’s algorithms. Commitment to consistent, quality posts is key!