How to Choose the Right Social Media Channels for Your Business

The first step to any successful social media marketing strategy is choosing the right channels to focus on. 

You have many different social media channels available, but adding them all into your marketing mix would be silly. This would require loads of time and effort, possibly resulting in lower-quality content that doesn't help your brand achieve its goals. 

Instead, select a few of the most relevant channels to focus on, and you’ll create a far greater impact. 

Are you unsure where to start or which platforms will offer the best possible ROI? To choose the right social media channels for your business, consider your target audience, the type of content you plan to share, and your marketing goals. We’ll break this all down for you.

Here are some of the main considerations to make when choosing the right social media channels for your business. 

1. Establish Your Social Media Marketing Goals

Before creating a social media strategy, it's crucial to establish clear objectives. This will help you avoid posting aimlessly and failing to achieve desired results. 

Objectives may include increasing website traffic, product sales, audience growth, engagement, or email list growth. Defining a clear social media goal helps you plan and post more effective content on relevant platforms. You can do this to achieve measurable outcomes. 

Once you have clear social media marketing goals in place, you’ll be able to choose which social media platforms best align with these goals. 

For example, if you want to generate serious B2B sales leads, LinkedIn is likely the best platform. However, if your goal is to build an engaged audience and show off your brand’s fun side, you might consider TikTok. Facebook is great for local businesses looking to gain more foot traffic. 

Start with the end in mind, and figure out what platforms can help you get there. 

2. Identify Your Target Audience 

Possibly the most important step to establishing what social media platforms are best for your brand is knowing who your target audience is. As long as you know who you're trying to reach and what online behaviors this group has, you’ll be in a great position to reach them. 

When it comes to choosing the right social media platforms for your brand, your goal is to focus on the social media platforms that your target audience uses. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting time on channels communicating with people who won’t become customers. 

Remember, your goal with social media marketing isn't only to build a large audience. Instead, it's to build an audience of prospective customers who end up making sales. Hence, you need a business development strategy in place

So, understand who these customers are if you're going to know how to target them. 

A key step in establishing your target audience is to create detailed target customer personas that include your target customers' age, interests, and online habits. This will help you align your social media strategy with the right channels. 

Then, understand the different demographics, groups, and online behaviors of the different social media channels. For example, TikTok is largely focused on a younger demographic, while you may have more success attracting an older crowd on Facebook.

3. Know What Type of Content You Plan to Share

Different social media platforms are created for different types of content. It's important that you have an idea of what kind of content you plan to create first. This way, you’ll be able to choose social media channels that best align with your content strategy and style. 

If you post the wrong type of content on a social media platform, chances are the platform’s audience won't engage with the content much. 

So, understand what kind of content you plan to create and choose a channel that matches this. 

For example, your content could be aimed at:

• Introducing yourself and your personality
• Showing customer success stories
• Creating entertaining content o build an audience
• Sharing client testimonials
• Displaying product images
• Sharing shoppable products

And so on. Each social media platform lends itself best to these different kinds of content. 

4. Understand Your Strengths and Resources

Social media marketing requires time, effort, and possibly some money too. When choosing what channels are best for your brand to focus on, it's important that these factors align with what you have available. 

In order to be successful on social media, you need to produce high-quality content. To do this, you need to have the right resources and abilities to create this content. 

For example, some people are great at producing Instagram Reels and TikTok videos, while others are less comfortable in front of the camera. While this should necessarily limit your social media options, it should play a role in determining what channels you’ll be able to create the best content on. 

Of course, ensure you have all the resources available to create the best possible content on your chosen channels. This is essential for using social media channels that do more for your business. 

5. Consider Paid Advertising Possibilities

One of the best ways to use social media to grow your brand is through running paid advertising campaigns. All social media platforms offer versions of paid ads; some could work better for your brand than others. 

If you plan to run ads, think about what action you want to get out of the ad and what social media platforms best support this. 

For example, if you're promoting eCommerce products, you could run shoppable product ads on TikTok or Instagram. If you're a local business, then Facebook offers some of the best location-based ad targeting options. 

The great thing about social media ads is that the different platforms have so much data on their users, so you can get very specific about how you target the ads. 

6. Consider Special Features

Different social media platforms offer different special features, trends, and functions. For example, eCommerce stores can actually sell products on certain platforms through in-app shopping experiences. 

Instagram offers awesome content possibilities with Stories, Stickers, and Reels. Facebook is a great place to establish a local business page (like in a directory), TikTok has a unique algorithm that can help you go viral, and LinkedIn has some awesome lead-generation tools. 

Whatever your goals are for social media, consider each platform's unique characteristics and possibilities. This could help you find the social media platform that lets you grow your brand most efficiently. 

You should also consider the different groups on social media platforms. These can be great places to find and engage with your target audience. 

7. Start Small 

Start with one or two social media platforms and build a strong presence before expanding to others. This is important because it will help you create a greater impact on your social media marketing efforts. 

If you try to cover too many channels and do too much, you might spread yourself too thin and end up not making an impact on any channel. Instead, focus on building a highly engaged audience on one or two channels, and you’ll end up gaining far more value from this. 

Remember, effective social media marketing is not about building the biggest possible audience; instead, it's about developing a highly engaged audience of potential customers. This will greatly impact your sales, which is what your marketing strategy is about. 

8. Monitor Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Continuously evaluate your social media strategy to ensure it aligns with your goals and meets the needs of your audience. This is important to ensure you're always focusing on the right channels and that your strategy and social media marketing goals are on track. 

Set clear KPIs alongside your goals that you can measure, and pay attention to these over time. This will help you understand what channels are helping your brand, what channels are not offering a great ROI, and where you might want to focus more of your attention. 

By consistently paying attention to the right metrics, you’ll be able to refine and adjust your social media strategy to get better results for your business. 

Conclusion

Choosing the right channels is essential to any social media marketing strategy. Get this right, and any of your social media marketing efforts will have a far greater impact.

Research each platform's features and demographics to determine which aligns with your marketing goals. Understand your marketing goals, and make sure that any platforms you use offer the features and functionalities you are after. Most importantly, ensure you have everything you need to create killer content on these platforms. 

This is all about marketing smarter. Forget about trying to do too much and focus on too many channels. Instead, focus on the channels that matter and produce great social media content. This is the only way to achieve true success with social media marketing.

Featured Image by Tracy Le Blanc on Pexels