Aligning the right social media platforms with your business
November 2014
The ubiquitous Facebook symbol is now so much so on business websites, that it almost becomes conspicuous when absent. But yet, when it is absent it often means that someone has actually thought about whether or not this particular social media platform is appropriate to its target customer, and rightly concluded that it isn’t.
But this point isn’t exclusive to Facebook, and the raft of different social media platforms are all-so-often adopted by businesses simply because they exist. Just this week, I’ve locked horns with a digital agency who have advised a mutual client to not only adopt all of the main social media platforms, but make the icons pride-of-place at the top of their five websites. Pinterest for a B2B business offering specialist factory safety services? No; I didn’t think so either.
When I advise businesses on what social media platforms to adopt, I start by asking a question and then applying a simple alignment tool. The question is about what the purpose of social media is for the business, and this could include one or more of the following:
· Increase brand awareness
· Increase brand saliency (meaning someone thinks of your brand when they think of your product category or service)
· To help improve SEO performance (social media engagement is now a key factor in search engine algorithms)
· Market research
· Customer services – i.e. normally to provide a vehicle for folk to post complaints and questions etc.
With that purpose established, we can now move onto the alignment tool which I like to show as a matrix. So let’s say that the business in question is the one I eluded to above which offers specialist safety products and services to factories, and the answers to the question were ‘increase brand saliency’ and ‘improve SEO performance’ (and only those two). The matrix would then look something like this (note there are other platforms I haven’t used – e.g. Instagram)…
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Google+ |
YouTube |
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Smith’s Factory Safety Products and Services |
No – because although it’s useful for SEO, nobody in the industry will like your page – let alone engage with it |
Worth doing if only because it’s useful to your customers to see new health and safety info with links back to the website |
No – because Pinterest thrives on all things visual, and safety products are about function, not aesthetics |
Yes – because although it has a relatively low level of usership, Google puts a disproportionate importance on it in search results |
Yes – because video is a useful way to demonstrate technical products and the value of them |
YES – and big time, because this is where your potential customers will reside and can be engaged with |
So if you’re having any sort of doubts about your current social media strategy and plan, then ask that question, then use the alignment tool – you might find you can lose the odd icon from your website (not to mention saving time on writing posts which nobody reads).
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