What We Have Done | SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM GUIDE
FOR YOUR BUSINESS IN 2021
Check out our guide to choose the best social media for you to connect with your customers today.
Read on or click to jump sections.
🔥 Why Social Media?
Social media marketing enables brands to connect with millions or billions of their ideal audiences for free.
A little fun fact, in 2020 alone, over 3.6 billion people were using social media. That’s like half of the world population!
With this huge number of available audiences, businesses should take advantage of it by pushing for brand awareness and nurturing the audience into customers.
With social media marketing, it can help your brand to:
- Get discovered by new audiences
- Engage your customers/ potential customers
- Build trust between brand & audience
- Drives organic traffic to your website
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🧐 Questions to ask when Choosing Your Social Media Platform
If you are excited to get into social media, be prepared! With over 100 available social media sites nowadays, it’s impossible for brands to be present in all of them. Narrowing your choices to a few of them seems to be the best option for us right now, but how do we know which ones are the right for your brands?
When choosing which social media sites to invest in, you need to ask yourself these 2 questions:
- Who is your audience and where are they hanging out?
- Which social media platform are you willing to commit to?
🤷♀️ Who is your audience and where are they hanging out?
Different social media has different audiences, and you as a brand need to understand who they are and where are they hanging out. It’s not about what the most popular social media are, but it’s about which one your target audience is using. It doesn’t matter if you choose the most popular social media right now if none of your target audience is using it.
Let’s take a look at these two social media sites; LinkedIn and Facebook. Both share the same features, which are sharing photos, videos, post statuses, etc. However, they don’t share the same audience. Generally, LinkedIn is a place for professionals to share their knowledge, while Facebook is meant for the general public to share updates about their life.
To help you understand your target audience, you need to ask yourself these questions:
- What is your audience’s age
- What is your audience’s gender?
- What does your audience value?
Check out the latest users data from the top 3 social media in Malaysia according to NapoleonCat.
Based on these statistics, if you are targeting younger audiences (18-24 years old), it’d be best for you to choose Instagram over Facebook and LinkedIn.
Once you understand who your audience is, go and be active in that social media! For any business, the right social platform can be a huge opportunity to grow your brand and connect with your ideal customer in a meaningful way.
⏰ Which social media platform are you willing to commit to?
To get the most out of your time on social media, be sure to have a strategy, create great content, and post consistently. Thus, it’s more important to focus on creating specific social media content that is maintainable in long term, than pushing for all social media platforms.
Each social media site has its kinds of content types. Some of the social media posts require more time and energy to create. For example, Youtube generally has longer and higher quality content than other social media like Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok.
Starting a social media account means that you are committed to creating and managing content for quite literally, forever. If you don’t have the time to create longer and higher-quality content, it’d be best for you to commit to lesser time-consuming social media.
Apart from time, do you have the resources to create that content right now? Can you shoot a video? Do you have the resource to edit a video? Can you design a post? If you can only commit to creating image posts, you can choose a primarily visual-based social media like Instagram or Facebook.
Remember, commitment to maintaining your social media in the long-term is the key here.
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6 Social Media to Choose From
People are using Facebook to get life updates about their friends and family. Due to this, Facebook’s algorithm is prioritizing personal moments posts from a normal account like your friends and family rather than a Facebook business page.
- On Facebook, you can share text, pictures, videos, and links as a post.
- Short to medium-form content tend to effectively grab your audience’s attention the most.
- Due to Facebook’s algorithm prioritizing over personal moments from your friends and family, posts from a business page has a low discovery rate.
If your target audiences are slightly older and you are looking for people who have the ability to spend, Facebook would be a good option for you.
People are using Instagram to capture and share their life’s best moments with visually appealing content. Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes user interaction with brands, creators, and followings that determine whose posts are displayed in the user’s feed.
- Instagram was built as a photo-sharing app at first, but now you can share a variety of primarily visual content like pictures, videos, and visual articles as a post.
- Short to medium-form content tend to effectively grab your audience’s attention the most.
- Instagram has medium-high discovery rate, making it’s easier for business accounts to reach new audiences organically.
If your target audiences are younger and you are selling a physical product, Instagram would be a good option for your business.
If you’re a professional, business leader, or brand, LinkedIn is the place to network professionally and build a professional identity. LinkedIn is prioritizing knowledge-sharing content from personal networks and opinion leaders.
- LinkedIn shared similar features with Facebook, you can share text, pictures, videos, and links as a post.
- Posts that are short to medium-form content tend to perform better on LinkedIn.
- Business accounts on LinkedIn have a medium discovery rate and help your brand reach new audiences.
If your target audiences are professionals and you want to network professionally to build a professional identity, LinkedIn would be the best for you.
TikTok
TikTok is all about entertainment! With TikTok, users are expecting quick entertainment with visuals, movements, sounds, and music. TikTok’s algorithm is prioritizing raw, entertaining content that matches with its user interest from brands and creators.
TikTok has only 1 type of content, which is video. Videos that are short to medium-form content tend to perform better on TikTok.
Right now, TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t discriminate a business account with a user account, making it the number one social media site that has the highest discovery rate.
If your target audiences are younger, especially gen Z and you want to reach as many people as you can to build awareness, TikTok would be the best for you.
Twitter is a place where you can instantly share your thoughts, ideas, and live updates with people all over the world.
You can type in any topic of interest to you and search for others including people and brands discussing the same topics you are interested in. Due to this, Twitter’s algorithm priorities content that matches with personal interest from brands, creators, and follows.
Twitter is primarily based on text, but users can also share pictures, videos, and links attached to a tweet. Due to a maximum of 280 characters limit, short-form content tends to do better on Twitter.
Twitter users can explore topics that they are interested in with anyone in the world, making Twitter a social media platform that has a medium-high discovery rate.
If your target audiences are millennials and you want to build a presence as a key opinion leader in your industry, Twitter would be the best for you.
Youtube
Did you know that Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world? Apart from its search engine, people are using Youtube’s content recommendations to find and discover information, education, and entertainment.
Youtube is focusing on 1 type of content, which is video. For content, medium to long-form videos tends to perform better on Youtube.
Each day, there are thousands of new videos uploaded to the site. It can be hard to compete with others to reach your audience, making Youtube a medium-low discovery rate social media platform.
If you want to reach any kind of audience and your current customer to entertaining them everlasting content, Youtube would be the best for you
