Social Media (Part II)

It's an old image but a good one

You looked at the last post. You worked out the basics of your social media, looked at your audiences, understood your resources, and nailed down what you want to achieve and sorted out what sort of voice you want to have. Excellent!

Now you need to do is choose which social media channels you want to use that will compliment that. So what do they all do? How are they different? And isn't it all about Facebook anyway?

This is a very basic overview on some of the most recognised services (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn) to help you get some ideas, but with any sort of investment, further research is definitely recommended, especially if the habits of your identified audience does not match any of the channels listed below.

Additionally, this is very biased towards Europe: for example YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google and more are all banned in China, so localisation of your strategy is super important!

Facebook

Facebook is without question the biggest and most active social network on the web, both in terms of name recognition and total number of users.

With nearly 1.8 billion active users, and over a billion people using Facebook daily, it's a good medium to reach a large number of people. The spread is fairly wide, with users throughout age ranges (often topping more than 70% in various countries) with a bias towards female-identified users.

It's also versatile with pages, groups, and targeted advertising, with it's strength is in its business to consumer reach. Facebook can be used to share photos, videos, important company updates and more, allowing for a wide ranging relationship. It's excellent for community building in many forms and bringing customers together. Advertising can be tied to demographics and locations, and is very good for local sales and brand awareness. Additionally, the site can be more low-maintenance than other social networks as it has a lower expected posting frequency than something like Twitter, and with the business features enabling scheduled posts it means you can be a little less tied to the pages, and people will scroll backwards on your page to look at prior entries.

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest online search engine after Google, has over a billion active users per month, and is heavily used as a resource for how-to content. The largest demographic of users is 25-34 year olds and 45% of users have some form of higher education.

If your customers and audience are asking questions, YouTube gives you the chance to provide unique, personality-filled answers to these questions and problems.

To use this, you must have the resources to have a good video editor. Whilst some companies choose not to, moderation of comments is a must. You can also engage via vloggers (video bloggers) who have dedicated channels with subscribed audiences, although they must always declare they have been sponsored and you are likely to need to pay depending on your industry.

Instagram 

Instagram is owned by Facebook, and is a visual social media platform based entirely on photo and video posts, and has nearly 400 million active users per month. It's all about the images, and offers easy-to-digest and aesthetically pleasing content. Images tend to be aspirational: beautiful images of travel, fashion, good food and such like, but there are images across the board. Companywise, if what is being sold can be visualised in an appealing way, this could be a good channel.

So who uses it? Well, Instagram has a bias towards a younger demographic with more than half it's users under the age of 30 with an equal gender split. More than 80 million photos are shared daily on instagram, and the platform, like snapchat, is almost entirely mobile. Instagram has a passionate community and has one of the highest engagement rates for brands, 58 times higher than on Facebook; however, it can be hard to find a niche. Company messaging needs to be heavily visual, and social media managers need to be good at photography and video editing.

Twitter

Twitter allows the sharing of short updates of 140 characters or fewer (ideally no more than 120 to allow for retweet handles) along with other media such as pictures, videos, URL links etc. By mentioning usernames in your posts, you can get the attention of other users and is one of the easiest ways to connect. It has around 319 million active monthly users, around 23% of internet users, and is slanted towards a more male-identified user group.

Twitter is effective for getting out news in a clear, concise fashion, skipping over the delays in press releases and other more traditional media, and is used as a resource by journalists. It creates a feeling of immediacy and access to a wide range of stakeholders, including knowing exactly what industry experts are looking into hour by hour, new developments, and can be a useful tool for handling customer service. Content is easily shared through retweeting, and creating the right tweet with the right hashtags can result in going viral very quickly. Along with LinkedIn, Twitter is one of the most professional/B2B focused channels.

It's worth being aware that Twitter is one of the most time sensitive mediums after snapchat. As Twitter moves so quickly, tweets tend to get lost quickly, so it's not the place for beautifully crafted content, and timing can be key to reaching a target audience. It also requires a quick response time: if a complaint comes via Twitter it needs to be at least moved onto private messages within a few hours, or face potential escalation. It is most easily handled through the use of apps like Hootsuite, allowing scheduling and easier searching.

Snapchat

Snapchat is another visual social media network which can only be used on mobile devices. It has 150 million active users, with 71% of are under 34 and around 70% are female. Whilst this has a large gender and age bias, in the UK more than 25% of smartphone users have snapchat installed. Users can send videos and photos to one another (which are deleted after 10 seconds), or post content to their public Stories, which disappears after 24 hours. As posts are so temporary, content is accepted to be a little more rough and ready than some other networks. Stories can be useful, but only users who have added a business can see their content.

Snapchat is excellent to create story and interactive content with a specified and engaged audience in a less formal setting, especially as the app includes chat features, messaging and other media content. 

LinkedIn

Whilst LinkedIn started as a professional networking site, it is now a knowledge and information-sharing hub. It has more than 35 million active users per month, has an older slant age range than most social media with the biggest demographic just being between 30-49, with the 50-64 age range just behind and is slanted more towards male-identified users. Users have the highest education level of all sites, and generally the highest incomes.

It allows professionals to showcase expertise, publicise awards, form professional communities, give business updates to relevant and interested audiences as well as network. LinkedIn via it's blog functionality has the best opportunity of enabling companies to become thought leaders through original content, and users tend to spend longer per page than in many other sites. It also provides a repository of information about a company and is a standard port of call for anyone doing any sort of research. However, it's worth being aware that it has one of the lowest engagement rates of any social media: simply put, users won't click a like for the sake of it, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

Of all the social media, LinkedIn is the most focused on business to business and professional in tone: this is most certainly not the place to put up pictures of your cat unless you work in some sort of animal health industry.

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There are of course, many other channels, but this is a place to get started. And when looking at which channels you wish to engage with, always remember that it's better to focus on one or two channels, than try and cover a gamut and get overwhelmed.

Have fun out there!