Which social media platform is right for your business?

Regardless of whether you are selling a product or providing a service, most people will check for an active social media page before committing. In 2023, Facebook had 2.989 billion active users according to datareportal.com. Those 2.989 billion people will open Facebook everyday, not your website. Therefore to make sure you get their attention, you need to be where they are to direct them to your web presence.

So how do you do this? This depends on your type of business and who your customers are.

Your demographic will indicate which social medium will allow you to reach them. However, the value to your business might not be on the platform you think it will be. The majority of people have a Facebook account, but users tend to be in the 25-34 age group and then older as they stay beyond their 34th birthday. To work with the algorithm, you will need good images and copy for your posts, inviting your audience to interact with you through reactions, comments and shares. If you run events, Facebook’s function for this will work well for you.

Instagram’s largest user age group is 18-24, and requires really good images to catch viewers’ attention. Hashtags are best used on this platform and although not the powerful follower generator they once were, (that’s live videos) they are useful to give posts contexts as to who they are aimed at and what they are about. As there is only one place where a web link can be inserted, Instagram is best for raising awareness of issues and information.

LinkedIn is aimed at corporate professionals, and so is not really relevant for a lot of businesses. Their business pages don’t perform as well as personal and so you are better off sharing the posts of your business’ page on your personal.

Youtube is best for product demonstrations, and videos will also work well on Facebook and Instagram. However, if your video is longer than 1 minute, Youtube is a good place to direct people to.

Are you selling products only? Paid campaigns will reach your audience and you will only need to set it up once with a regular payment with regular adjustments to the target market to ensure it reaches your ideal customer.. However, if you have a good community presence (perhaps you are a local shop or centre), regular organic posts shared to local community pages will reach your customers and using Facebook’s Event function can allow people to commit to coming to things you are running.

If your main thing is service provision, put your updates on your main page so clients can see and share them.

Use your website headings as a guide for the types of posts you can put out, e.g. blog, shop, testimonials.. Your social media needs to reflect what is on your main space to act as a reminder for people to visit you online.