If you are involved with marketing a brand, whether it is your company or personal brand, you have likely wrestled with the question of the scope of your involvement with social media. A recent article asked the question that may have crossed your mind: “Are there too many social networks?” At the very least, the number of social networking sites can leave your head spinning. Which networks should I use? How will I use the social nets we join? How the heck am I going to keep up with posting and reading on our accounts? These are three valid questions for any marketer to ask. Let’s answer them by asking three additional questions.
1. Who Do You Want to Engage?
The first question to ask when evaluating a social network is who are the people you desire to connect with online. They are most likely customers and leads that comprise your target market. Strive to identify social networks whose user demographic characteristics match up well with your target market. Below is an overview of user characteristics of five of the largest social networking sites:
|
Network |
% of All Internet Users |
Distinguishing User Characteristics |
|
|
71% |
High usage across subgroups, but higher proportions of women, young people (18-29), income of less than $50K, and some college or less |
|
|
18% |
Balance men and women users; higher proportions of African Americans, young people, college educated, and incomes over $75K |
|
|
17% |
Higher proportions of women, African Americans, Hispanics, young people, some college, and income of less than $50K |
|
|
21% |
Predominantly women, broader age range (18-49), college graduate, suburban dweller, and higher incomes (over $50K) |
|
|
22% |
Higher proportions of men, African Americans, early-mid career (ages 30-49), high education and income levels |
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
Your time and resources are limited; focus on the social networks that will deliver the right audience to you. That is, have a presence on sites that are used most by your target market.
2. What Do You Want to Accomplish?
Once you have established which social networking sites can best connect you to the people you seek to engage, consider what you want to get out of your social media efforts. Different sites possess distinct benefits for users. A few examples include:
- Build brand awareness or shape brand image– Facebook is by far the largest social network. Posting photos or stories about your company, employees, or customers that people want to share with their friends is one way that social media involvement can influence how people think about your brand.
- Inform about product features and benefits – If your product is more complex and would benefit from more extensive explanation or demonstration, channels conducive to long-form content like YouTube or a blog would enable you to tell your story in more detail.
- Strengthen customer relationships- While all social media channels are useful for gathering feedback from customers and others, the real-time flow of communication on a site like Twitter can be used to monitor customer sentiment, deliver timely responses to questions, or resolve customer problems. Retail businesses in particular should utilize social media to empower customers to reach out. Let them talk to you, not about you! Check out this example from Best Buy:
This customer’s tweet received a reply in less than an hour with a recommended next action step.
3. What Are Your Communication Needs?
The third question to guide your social media marketing channel strategy his highly correlated with the first two questions: Given the target audience and marketing objectives, what are your communication needs in terms of content and messaging? Returning to the objectives discussed in Question #2, if you desire to make your company more personable by featuring employees, video interviews posted to your YouTube channel and Facebook page or adding employees to your “Twitter Team” are ways to bring employees to the forefront. If you want to capture unique or interesting uses or users of your products, posting photos to Instagram or Pinterest (depending on audience characteristics, of course) are two ways to use social content to reinforce the brand image you aspire for the brand.
Not a Yes or No Question
The question you should be asking is not whether you should use social media- your customers and future customers are on social networks- so why would you not be there? This issue reminds me of what marketers faced circa 2000 with the World Wide Web. “We need a website” became a common position among businesses. But, many of the same people uttering this statement would have to honestly add to it by saying “but we have no idea what it should contain or what it should accomplish for our business.”
Many brands have struggled with this same issue in establishing a social media presence. Ask the three questions about audience, objectives, and communication needs. And, a quality over quantity mindset is needed. Setting up accounts on four different social nets can be detrimental to the brand if they are not kept up with fresh content and monitored to respond to visitors’ comments or questions. It is better to become proficient at using one social network then adding to your social media mix than starting with multiple sites on which your brand presence is mediocre.
