Social Media, you're told you have to be on it, but how do you choose the best platform for your business?

As a business owner or marketer, you don’t have infinite time and resources to be everything to everyone. You can’t afford to be on every social platform, but equally, you can’t afford to ignore social media either. It’s more important to choose the platforms that work for you, your business goals, and your customer wants - and then to engage on them well.

So let's get started. There are thousands of social networks out there to choose from, but the good news is that you can start by narrowing it down to the most popular and most widely used platforms. From there, it’s all about determining which platform will give you the exposure you're looking for with the right audience, and figuring out which one will help you meet your marketing objectives. 

Here are four easy (ish) steps to step you choose the right platforms for your business:

1. Narrow down your choices
2. Define your business objectives
3. What platforms are your target audience using
4. What content does your business create

Narrow down your choices

There are social media platforms out there for everything and everyone, including ones to connect people with shared interests, similar hobbies, comparable demographics, and much more. The point is that there are way too many social networking sites out there to ever have a presence on them all, and your time would be better spent focusing on the sites that get the most traffic. Of all the social media sites out there, the top ones in terms of monthly active users include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Define your business objectives

There are many benefits to using social media, but it’s important to have specific goals before you move forward. For one, your objectives will help determine not only the social platform you choose, but also the content you create, the audience you target, and more. Here are some of the most common benefits of using social media that you might want to focus on:

• Improving your customer service offerings by providing another platform on which customers can reach out with complaints, questions, and concerns Identifying new leads and prospects who are similar to your best customers
• Reaching out to new audiences and new demographics who might be receptive to your products or services Increasing brand awareness and exposing your business to new people
• Learning about the needs, wants, and habits of your audience and customers. Increasing traffic to your site and boosting sales

What platforms are your target audience using

The entire point of social media marketing is to put you in contact with your best audience, so it’s not advisable to choose a platform where your audience doesn’t operate. Unfortunately, there's no Field of Dreams opportunity here where your prospects will start to use the social platform of your choice just because you’ve created a profile. Instead, it’s a much better idea to analyze which platforms your audience prefers and to seek them out on the networks they're already using.

There are a few different ways you can go about finding where your audience is hanging out online, and one of the most straightforward is a simple customer survey. Ask questions like what social sites they use, where they get their information online, and which influencers they listen to. Another way to get information about your audience is through the social media sites themselves. With platforms like Facebook, you can actually tell Facebook about your ideal customers, and they'll estimate the audience size for you. You can also research the demographics of different social media users thanks to the Pew Research Center for Internet and Technology to determine where your audience is most likely spending their online time.  

What content does your business create

Different types of content work better with certain social media platforms, so it’s integral that you consider the type of content you like to create and that works best with your brand. Instagram, for instance, is all about the pictures, so it may not be the right choice if most of what you create is long-form textual content like whitepapers. The type of content you create will depend on a number of things, including your industry, your brand, and your target audience, but content types you may focus on include:

• Blog posts
• Podcasts
• Testimonials
• User-generated content
• Webinars
• Live streams
• Ebooks
• Whitepapers
• Videos
• Photographs
• Quizzes

Once you’ve settled on the goals you want to achieve with social media, determined where your audience is already hanging out and decided what type of content works best for you, you can then go through and compare the different social media platforms to determine which one will best meet your needs. To help you decide, here's a rundown of the top platforms, what they're good for, and what a typical user looks like: