Your business being on one social media platform isn’t enough. Nor is simply having one unified message across all of its social media platforms. For the best reach, you’ll want a social media strategy that spans multiple platforms and speaks to all kinds of customers.
If your company’s range of products and services are broad enough to cater to multiple demographics, this is especially important. The first question to ask yourself is: who are my customers?
Which Platforms Should I Use?
Different platforms are generally preferred by different age groups, although you’ll encounter users from every demographic on all of them. Consider which type of social media your target audience is more likely to use to engage with your content.
To work out the best platforms to use when marketing, you can conduct tests to judge where your content performs best. Not every social media app suits the same communication style or purpose. Your business’ messaging should change for each platform you use to publish content.
Over the course of a month, post across every platform and collect engagement analytics. Then, you can narrow your focus to a couple of platforms that you have the best reach on.
Let’s consider the landscapes and unique features of the most common social media platforms. This can help us understand why your business needs to adopt different personas across the internet.
Read Now: Humanise Your Brand and Give it a Clear Voice
Facebook is the most obvious ‘catch-all’ platform. If you’re a part of a new business and you don’t know where to start with your social media presence, it’s probably here.
Many young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 are active on Facebook. 86% of them, according to Khoros.
The same set of data, however, shows a surprising reach to older demographics: 77% of 30–49-year-olds, 51% of 50–65-year-olds, and 34% of people over 65 all use Facebook.
If Facebook is the ‘big tent’ of marketing, consider a muted approach in your persona. Be literate and use punctuation. While younger customers may appreciate postmodernism, you’ll be unlikely to connect with your older ones.
Customers on Facebook are more likely to be using the platform to stay in touch with family and friends. Keep your approach straightforward to avoid anyone taking exception to your content. It’s better to write in a neutral tone of voice to reach everyone.
On your official business page, Facebook gives you the opportunity for longer posts, longer videos and many images within a post. This can be useful for product announcements or demonstrations, with more depth than other platforms accommodate for.
Twitter skews younger. 38% of 18-29 year-olds use it: less than Facebook, but with a more considerable drop-off across older demographics. If your business is targeting younger users, consider various unconventional approaches that can humanise your brand.
Writing in lowercase, emojis, animated GIFS, and anything that might fit the broad category of a meme can all help.
If most of that sentence confuses you, then a good rule of thumb is that, typically, more playful content can work well here. Twitter actively encourages brevity and multimedia flippancy as a ‘microblogging’ platform, making this a wise approach.
While Facebook affords you all the space in the world to get your message across, Twitter limits the content of your message to 280 characters. You can thread tweets together easily enough in the Tweet window, but these can be difficult to track and to read.
When using the regular interface, Twitter limits non-verified accounts to videos of 2 minutes and 20 seconds. In light of this, you may want to experiment with repurposing your video content intended for other platforms. Quicker editing, for example might suit the unconventional tone Twitter pushes users towards.
Alternatively, try posting video content to another platform altogether, such as YouTube. Or use Twitter’s Media Studio, a tool to upload, manage, monetise, and receive analytics for videos of up to ten minutes in length, in addition to static images and GIFs.
If you want to be able to use Twitter effectively, an alternative persona – in both senses of the word – is necessary.
Read Now: Using Memes to Promote Your Business on Social Media
Instagram, owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, skews even younger than Twitter, with 67% of 18-29 year olds using it. It emphasises photos over text, and a ‘Story’ feature (a sequence of posts that disappear after 24 hours).
These elements make it an ideal platform to give customers a human insight into your business. For example, this could be what a day-to-day life is like at your company and projects you’re working on.
The overwhelming presence of young people on the app still gives you room to be playful with your approach, while offering more crossover with older demographics. 47% of people aged 30-49 use Instagram.
Being the primary platform of many celebrities and influencers, you have more options regarding your inbound marketing methods. New businesses can often misjudge influencers as a strategy, so it’s recommended to do some research first.
Read Now: Creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy
Instagram also encourages users to publish short-form content. Regular posts allow for videos up to 60 seconds, and ten photos. Posts within ‘Stories’ allow for up to 15 seconds of video. These restrictions, like Twitter’s, may seem frustrating at first, but limitations drive creativity.
Other Platforms
There are also platforms such as TikTok available, known for its large userbase of young people. Limited to video, it skews even more heavily towards the young demographic and individual personalities than Instagram. For this reason you may find it difficult to market here, but it’s not impossible.
You can try applying the metrics of age demographic and app design to create a social media strategy for:
Read Now: How Tiktok Can Help You Grow Your Small Business
To Sum Up…
Think outside the box about the type of content your business can produce wherever it has a presence online.
Be aware of new platforms gaining traction amongst your targeted demographics. Such changes are gradual and slow, but for the most effective social media strategy, you need to keep on top of them.
When it comes to the fast-moving landscape of social media, it isn’t about what everyone else is doing. What are they not doing? Look for a gap in the market(ing) you can plug.
If you’d like to know what more you can do to improve your social media strategy, contact us at Floodmaker.