Social Media in your marketing

Which social media should you prioritize in your marketing?

In the jungle of social media, it cannot be easy to know how to prioritize. Should we be on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter? Or perhaps all. What about Snapchat and Instagram? Here is some advice on how to proceed and choose.

1. Ask your customers

To get a general idea of what social media your customers use, you can ask them:

• Have a talk with your 10 main customers by phone
• Send out a survey by mail to your customers
• Ask them to specify which social channels they are active in or rank them, and what they use; job, private or both?

If you work with B2B marketing, you might have to deal with several people in a company. Then it might be useful to have done the groundwork to prepare personas first since there often are connections between what people are working on and which social media they are active in.

Our experience is such that marketing managers are more active on Twitter than, e.g. CFOs and general managers, while both groups tend to have a LinkedIn profile.

2. Analyse what is being shared

If you already have a blog on your website, see the sharing buttons for social media and the numbers next to each icon. How many shares do the posts have on your chosen social media channels? This gives you an indication of which social media channel your target audiences are active in.

If you do not have a blog, that’s no problem. Look at your competitor’s blog or a blog in a related or similar industry.

If you don’t have any real references, you can go to SmartInsights or HubSpot and get access to tools that will give you great insights in which competitor content is most popular. You can search for the topics you want to know more about. Based on the search phrase you enter it lists articles and blog posts that contain the same phrase with the most shared case top. Here’s a quick overview of how the activity is distributed among the various social networks.

3. Use the channels that your customers are using and think VALUE FOR CUSTOMER.

Once you know which social media channels your target audience is using, you should use and establish a good profile for each one. In addition to having a company profile should consider creating your personal profile too. We have an active business profile on LinkedIn, one profile on Twitter and a personal and a Business page on Facebook. We share mainly from our website and other updates that we believe will be of value to your followers. We have also made it possible for readers to share your posts with a single click on all blog posts.

A quick introduction to the 7 biggest social media channels

1. Facebook hardly needs any introduction. The network was launched in 2004, and you will meet people from teens to grannies here. Globally, Facebook has 2.9 billion users worldwide (September 2022) and 46.6 million in the UK (September 2022). Businesses can create Facebook pages and publish videos, text and image updates. This is shown in the news stream to those who follow the page. The increase in pages people follow has led to Facebook is now filtering the news flow, which in practice means that a Facebook page today only has 4-6% visibility on their updates. The remaining gap of up to 100 per cent is covered with paid updates.
2. Twitter has 241 million active users worldwide (October 2022), and 23.6 million profiles are from the UK. The network was launched in 2006. Update sharing here can have a maximum of 280 characters, and the network is often called a microblogging service. Many companies use Twitter as a customer service channel and actively listen to conversations that mention their brands. They are also actively participating in a way that is not intrusive and selling but which adds value.
3. LinkedIn is a professional network that was established in 2003 and has 810 million users worldwide (October 2022). In the UK, LinkedIn has 34.9 million users (September 2022). From being an online CV database and “corporate Facebook”, LinkedIn has established itself as a content provider with a concept that looks more like an online newspaper than a social medium.
4. YouTube is the second largest search engine owned by Google. Video Network was established in 2005 and has per October 2022 over 2.1 billion users per month (10 times more than Vimeo), which together have over 6 billion hours of video. Every minute, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
5. Instagram is a social network where you can share photos and video clips of up to 15 seconds with their followers. Instagram is a cultural phenomenon that has turned anyone into a photographer, and you can get just about any picture to look good by applying an Instagram filter. The network was started up in 2010 and, two years later, acquired by Facebook. Instagram has 1,44 billion users worldwide (October 2022).
6. Snapchat is among the younger social media, established in 2011. Snapchat has over 450 million users (October 2022), of which the majority are between 18-24 years old (UK). The service allows users to share pictures or videos with selected people via a mobile app. Unlike Instagram, it does not store files in an archive, they disappear after a few seconds.
7. Pinterest is an online community that serves as an interactive bulletin board where users can organize photos and videos in different collections, for example, divided into interests or hobbies. Pinterest was launched in 2010 and has 433 million users worldwide (September 2022). An interesting fact is that 77 per cent of users are women.

Every social medium has its own distinctive character, which should be respected. How you should use the various social media channels will need a blog post that will come on another occasion.