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As anyone who is both A. alive and B. living in the year 2016 can tell you, social media is pretty big. It’s gigantic. Gargantuan. You might even say it’s brobdingnagian (which is apparently a real word. Thanks thesaurus.com!). You already know this.
It’s a multibillion-dollar industry that can make millionaires out of kids making goofy home movies on YouTube and provide you with information about a major event on the other side of the world seconds after it happens. Every brand under the sun has gotten on board at this point. In today’s world if you don’t have some sort of social media presence, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to reach those who would have never heard of you otherwise.
So what’s the smart move when it comes to managing your social presence? You want maximum exposure, so you set up an account on everything from FourSquare to Digg. You go to sleep at night with the comfort of knowing that you’re reaching everyone everywhere and your business can only benefit from all that attention you’ll surely be receiving, right?
Nope.
Just as with any other aspect of advertising your business, your resources are limited. You don’t have an unrestricted budget, and you shouldn’t be wasting your time with platforms that aren’t conducive to reaching those who could potentially bring you business.
“But Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, they’re all free!” you say. Yes, you are correct, in a way. They are free in the sense that it doesn’t cost any money for a business to set up an account (for now, though it is likely that this will change in the coming years). However, setting up and actively maintaining these accounts requires a commodity that is not nor ever will be unlimited: time. You can have an account on every single social media site out there, but to actually see any sort of return on your investment, you have to produce content, share it and interact with others. These endeavors take time, which no one ever seems to have enough of as it is. There’s a reason that companies hire specialists to take the reigns of their social media for them; it’s a lot to deal with, especially when trying to keep up with accounts on seven or eight platforms. This brings us to our point.
Maximize your online presence by streamlining it.
Say you run a photography studio that specialized in portraits. You’ll probably want an Instagram, a blog to keep your fans and potential customers updated and for SEO, a Behance profile to show off your work professionally, and maybe a Facebook page. You don’t need Snapchat, you don’t need Foursquare, you don’t need a Vine. No one goes on Snapchat, with its low-res photos and brief snippets of content looking to hire a professional photographer. That’s likely not your target audience, and the precious time you would invest in that endeavor would only keep you from performing tasks relevant to your business and your profession. Think about what your brand is, what you’re selling and who’s buying it. If that doesn’t match up with the demographic that typically comes with a particular platform, don’t bother with it.
Every brand and every situation will be different, obviously, so knowing your own budget in regard to both time and money, as well as who your audience is will give you a better idea of what social media to invest in and which ones to leave alone. It’s also important to know why users typically jump onboard with a particular platform over another, and keep that in mind when developing your overall social strategy.
Knowing your brand, as we have said before, is imperative, and it remains true when deciding whether you should be vining, snapping, ‘gramming, or tweeting about all of the above.
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