The hardest part about knowing which social media platform is best for your business is if you don’t have a customer profile, or an ideal customer in mind you won’t know which platform is best to reach them. Each platform has a certain demo of user base, so understanding who is on the different platforms helps you create content and who you’re creating it for.
One of your main goals when using social media should be to create content that engages your followers to comment and interact with you. This will create a closer connection between them and you.
If you’re in a B2B sales environment, there’s no doubt LinkedIn is the best environment for a social media platform for your corporate business. However, as i remember from my corporate days, a lot of those corporate employees would spend a lot of time during the day on facebook AND instagram, so just because it’s mostly professional on linkedin, you still have the opportunity to reach them elsewhere.
LinkedIn allows you to have a personal page where you can connect with coworkers from now until your summer high school jobs, and it also allows companys’s to have a LinkedIn company business page, in the same way you would a Facebook business page. You can create and share content on the LinkedIn Business page the same way.
Same thing with Twitter for business. It’s importance has died down now that there’s no random news drops in the middle of the night, but it’s still a fast paced, news oriented platform and so if you’re involved with fast moving news and information, this should be where you spend your time. Pictures and videos work, but short quips work best. I think 244 is the max character limit now.
So Facebook and Instagram for business. Both overcrowded, but according to some stats almost 70% of ‘social media traffic’ flows through Facebook and Instagram. Yes it’s crowded, but at the same time, everyone is there. If you can create content that people can easily share on facebook you’ll get a lot more exposure for your business.
Not only that but a Company Facebook page, a company facebook GROUP, as well as the neighborhood groups where you do business are great ways to interact with potential clients.
Instagram’s sharing feature isn’t native like facebook but you can encourage reposting for contests and free giveaways and the like. Instagram is exclusively an image based platform, so a photo or video should be your main source of info, and the text might be secondary, if only for organizing and hashtag purposes.
Live video for your business on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitch, etc……. can be tricky. Make sure you’re live streaming something that can go smoothly, keep it short, unless it turns into an amazing q & a and people are interacting, then go as long as you can. Or live stream an entire event so people at home can experience the event.
This video can then be cut up into smaller parts for Instagram/facebook/linkedin/youtube/tiktok…
YouTube, to me, is an essential social media platform for all businesses. It’s the #2 search engine and it’s where most people go to solve problems. Plus, for now, when you ask a question into google if there’s a highly recommended video that will appear below only 1 ad with a time marker showing WHERE THE QUESTION IS ANSWERED.
So what questions are people asking about your business? If you can create sharable, helpful content that answers these questions you’ll have a better chance of attracting new people to what you do, and you’ll be able to better utilize social media for your business.
You can utilize the youtube storage with playlists and embedding to include specific videos on your business website. And what we also think is the only uninterrupted 5 seconds in the world, you can promote your video to play before someone else’s video or on the side bar as a recommended video.
Youtube has certain specifications about video placement dependent on your landing page goals, but those can easily be sorted out and optimized!
So does size matter on social media for business?
Yes. But no. But really yes.
The way to plan is to front-load your information, so if you really want to make sure people know something say it as early as possible. If you’re interrupting their fb or insta scrolling they’re just looking for a little taste, but if someone goes to your youtube channel they may watch 15-minute videos every time they go to your page. Same thing on your website, maybe you release a weekly show on your blog and people watch the whole thing every time because they like what you’ve created in the past.
They need to be interesting! That’s the most important part!
Movie and television studios spend a lot of money to make their content as beautiful and punchy and emotional as they can. Creating content is a different task that having the info to create the content. If it’s not able to come across in an exciting way it will be difficult for people to stick around, and then they won’t get your message.
It’s important your script or talking points get across the message you intend them to. Consider hiring writers to craft your message and editors to help edit your footage with stock b roll or other ways to make it punchy. Good luck!