By now, if you’re a small business owner or an entrepreneur, you’ve implemented a social media marketing campaign on Facebook — maybe Twitter. You understand the importance of encouraging your audience to share information about new products and react to how your target audience responds.
Facebook and Twitter may be the juggernauts of the social media marketing platforms, but there are plenty of other social media platforms you should have a strategy for in 2018 to gain more clients, analyze feedback about your company or brand, and to conduct market research. Below are some other social media platforms rather than Facebook and Twitter that can help you reach a much wider array of demographics that future clients may be hiding in.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media manager’s savior. It allows for, if duty calls, multiple managers to have one place to post and engage audiences via multiple social media platforms — perfect if you need to post the same post* on several different platforms. Managers can message among themselves to keep track of when and where to post.
*FYI – Avoid sharing the “exact” same post across different channels, since people who use multiple social networks may not appreciate seeing the same post in different places. Keep your audience in mind when creating your messages!
If you know you won’t be able to get around to a crucial post, you can schedule posts to go live for specific times. Hootsuite also has an analytics feature where you can monitor how each account is doing. If you have multiple social media platforms for your marketing campaign — which you should — Hootsuite will make managing them much easier.
Facebook and Twitter should be involved in your social media marketing campaign. However, if you are only using Facebook and/or Twitter, you are overlooking many untapped resources to get your content to a larger audience. These different social media platforms will give you additional approaches to reach new audiences and help build your business or brand.
Snapchat
For a young target audience, Snapchat is perfect. As Neil Patel highlights, 70 percent of Snapchat users are under 25 years old. Snapchat’s content mostly includes Daily Stories, which are images and videos — sometimes accompanied with text — that, when looked at, disappear after 10 seconds.
The purpose of the content of Snapchat is to share those short little moments. Show your audience how people work behind the scenes at your office, an office party, or let your following know what’s happening live at a conference. With Snapchat, you can constantly update your business’ story as it unfolds, privately deliver content for more personal client conversations, or host contests and promotions.
LinkedIn is world’s different from Snapchat, with an older, professional target audience in mind. It is a way for an individual to network with other individuals within their respective industries, learn about the industry, and who are the key figures. One important thing to remember about LinkedIn is that it is not an extension of your resume.
From a marketing standpoint, Linkedin is perfect for building brand awareness. Network with others in your industry and clients to encourage business connections and expand your audience. You can even lead a discussion with members of your industry. LinkedIn embodies the spirit of developing relationships.
If your target audience is mostly female, there are about 100 million users on Pinterest, and 85 percent of them are female. In other words, if your business or brand targets women, you must have a marketing campaign for Pinterest. Pinterest gives you a different platform to get your content out via images.
Tutorials, how-tos, and demos are perfect for Pinterest. It is great for the fashion, travel, and art industries, with many influencers swaying the views of your posts, or pins. Collaborate with a popular, already established, member give your brand or business’ content or services a vote of confidence. All retail and e-commerce companies would do well to involve Pinterest into their social marketing campaign.
Google+
Google Plus appeared poised to explode a few years back, with Google investing heavily in promoting the platform. Over a quarter of a billion users reportedly signed up for the service, but only a fraction of those have remained active and in many circles Google+ is remembered mockingly, if it’s remembered at all.
But before you snicker and dismiss, you might consider taking another look at Google Plus. They’ve quietly beefed up the tools that enable marketers and business owners to engage with their core demographic. Google+ Communities now comes with a bevy of interesting features and provides brands and individuals the ability to create, or become part of, a group of people passionate about a certain niche or set of ideas.
It’s very similar to some of the Facebook groups you are probably already a part of, but offers several additional features that marketers will love to sink their teeth into. And since it is interwoven into other Google products you are already using, there’s plenty of reasons for you to give Google+ another exploration. I personally find that “signal-to-noise” ratio of certain niche G+ Communities is much stronger than Facebook groups.
A multi-platform social media marketing strategy can become extremely difficult to manage and keep track of. But social media marketing is too valuable to neglect. Luckily, there are tools tailor-made to handle the many moving parts of social media management.
If you’re not sure which social media platform is right for your business, let’s talk! Contact me today to get a fresh perspective on the direction of your marketing strategy in 2018.
