Make Social Media a Tool, Not a Distraction

As a college student involved in multiple organizations, engaging students was a major goal in each group. Often, social media would be leveraged as a tool and someone would shout out ideas: “Facebook!” “Pintrest!” “Twitter!” “Instagram!” While all of these social networks can be used a tools, that doesn’t mean they all should be.

Outside of school, I see the same struggle with businesses. It’s clear social media is being recognized as a useful too, but maximizing its impact is takes some focus and intent. To grow your business, it is important to find the right platform for engaging your target audience.

If you’re a small business without a huge marketing team, knowing your core audience is important. Determine what your buyer persona looks like and make sure you’re using a tool like Google Analytics to measure traffic on your site. Once you have a better understanding of this information, you can do a little research to determine which social networks these demographic tend to use. By appealing to your core persona and using the right social network, you are on track to maximize the impact of each post.

Now, I’m not saying to ignore social media platforms. But if you’re a fashion designer, Instragram may have more impact than Twitter. Similarly, if your core buyers are aged 35+, they may gravitate toward Facebook more than Snapchat. In these instances, a single post on the right platform is going have a higher ROI than a single post on the wrong platform. This is a big step in capturing the right audience.

Ultimately, it is important to know that quality is more important than quantity. If you’ve committed to using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Pintrest you may be spreading your manpower too thin. Rather, using one post strategically on the right platform will consume less time and have a higher chance of getting the right customer to engage. It will also allow you to dedicate more time to ensuring the content you produce is high quality and a proper representation of your brand.

Social Media is a great tool, but don’t assume everyone is going to follow you on every platform. Find the right platform and use a good strategy. Then you will start to see an improvement in your engagements.