Most people in business are at least curious about social media. it’s been around for 10+ years now. There are a lot of stories and case studies about how brands, well known brands, have built their businesses on the back of social media where they engage their current and future customers.
Some believe the answer to successful social media is to at least test all of the platforms. That’s good in theory, but it requires time. It often requires money in some fashion. And many businesses, even the large ones, aren’t interested in that method.
One way to go is to narrow it down a bit. Narrow the choices so you’re likely choosing one that is the right fit for you business.
Here are a few questions to consider…
Question #1. How does your company communicate?
One of my favorite business books is actually the series of books by Jim Collins. He analyzed businesses of all types and figure out some key things about those that are successful. And using the same metrics, why some aren’t successful.
A key finding from Collins was that what makes a business tick isn’t often something that is defined and the built toward. It’s often discovered after a business has been around awhile. Then it can be used as kind of a guiding beacon for various things.
How does your communicate?
Do you mostly use email? Do you visit each other often in the office? Do you speak on the phone? Do you use video chat and even send each other videos?
And it’s not just about how you communicate with each other. It’s about how you communicate with prospects, customers, vendors and pretty much every form of communication with every other person that comes into contact with your business.
Your team probably has at least a slight preference overall for one of the following:
- Written word
- Video
- Audio
The one that wins out as the preferred method in your business gives a very important indication as to what social media platform(s) are the best fit. Social media, after all, is where humans go to interact with each other. They mostly focus on those three forms of content. Facebook, even though it has expanded into video, still seems very heavily focused on the written word. That’s how it was built. TikTok, on the other hand, was built on video.
Question #2. Who is likely to create the content?
Do you have a person that you’re going to put in charge of social media in your company. Many companies still view social media as kind of an add-on job task for an established employee. Others will look to hire someone. Usually they will look for someone that has proven results in social media, but that still fits with their other employees. So that person will probably have the same communication preferences.
However your business is going to find someone, look at what their preference is for creating content. There doesn’t seem to be a wide margin in terms of what type – video, written word and audio – is better. They are all good. They can all be the right answer depending on the business.
The key is identifying the person or persons that will be creating the content for you and identifying the type they are best at or most likely to become best at.
Don’t Fall In Love With Platforms
One of the frustrating things with social media marketing has been that platforms come and go. There were quite a few social media platforms around the time that Facebook was gaining traction. They pretty much won out in their form of social media. And that won’t change any time soon.
But other offshoots of social emerged. Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc.
Social media platforms come and go and even when one reaches a critical mass, another variation pops up to take some of the attention. That will always happen.
And another frustration that occurs is that social media platforms often reward creators with organic reach in the early days. For example, if you created a nice piece of content as a business on Facebook in 2010 it would likely reach all of your followers and even more than that. But within a few years, after Facebook had matured, they started taking back some of the organic reach in favor of advertising.
That happened with Google earlier. That happened with TV earlier. That happened with radio earlier. That happened with newspapers and magazines earlier.
The key is to not get caught up in the hot social media platform today. To not get caught up in how they do things today.
What probably won’t change is the fact that social media sites will use some variation of the written word, video and audio. If you focus on the one that fits you best. Focus on creating it and learning what people want. Then you can quickly adjust based on what platform is hitting at any given moment in the future.