Which Social Media To Use For Your Small Business

Social media can be a very effective tool in promoting your website or your brand if used correctly. However, to succeed you need to be very savvy when it comes to managing your social media presence. Furthermore,  you must decide what social media platform to focus on to gain the most benefit in the least amount of time.

But what is the best social media platform for your brand? Here are few strategies to help you choose.

As a general rule, it’s best to join main top social sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram. The very least thing you can do is setup a keyword rich profile on each network with links to your website and clear description of what you and your company do. However, this is a bare minimum and after joining these sites, you need to do more research and study each platform to help you figure out which one can deliver the best results for your specific type of business. If you’re a photographer, maybe Instagram is the best choice for you. However if you mostly deal with corporate clients, LinkedIn might be a better option for you. Obviously, every social network is different and you need to figure out which one serves your type of business better and why.

There a couple ways you can figure out what network you should concentrate your efforts on.

Study Your Website Social Media Sharing Stats.

One way to figure out which networks is best for you is to use analytics on your website. When you built your website one of the first things you should have done is to set up social sharing widgets on every page so visitors can easily share your content. Take a look at your posts and determine which ones got the largest amount of traffic and shares. By analyzing the number of times each post has been shared and on which network, you will see the pattern and be able to figure out which articles got shared the most and where. If your infographic or a blog post gets only small number of re-tweets but many more likes on Facebook on a consistent basis, then it’s a good sign you should focus your energy on writing similar posts and sharing them on Facebook more frequently and spend less time on Twitter. Stats don’t lie, so study the numbers and figure out how to better spend your time when promoting your content.

Find Out How Often Your Posts Get Shared, Mentioned, Retweeted

Another good way to figure out which network is more beneficial for you is to measure how many followers you have on each social network and how often your brand gets mentioned or the hashtags you’re using is being reused. If you only have a small number of fans on Facebook but many more followers on Twitter and if that’s where most of your traffic is coming from, then it’s a good sign you should double down and use Twitter more to promote your posts.

Study Your Competition

Finally, you can also find who are your popular competitors are and figure out what social networks they’re using to promote their brand. If they’re in the same niche and cover similar topics with lots of followers then it’s probably a sign that it’s paying off for them and you should follow their lead. But you should take a step further and try to improve on what they’re offering otherwise you will always be outdone by them.

However, please keep this in mind that even after you decided which network you should focus on, you still need to be somewhat active on other networks. There is still a benefit of being involved on other social channels, but do it wisely and not waste time on the ones that are not very beneficial for your business.

These are just a few strategies to help you determine which social media sites is best for your business. Spending a little time figuring out which networks are more beneficial for you will help you determine how much time you need to spend on each platform. Once you have this information you can then maximize your effort to ensure you’re not wasting your time promoting your brand on the platform that doesn’t benefit you and your brand.

In the future postings, we will cover few very useful tools that can help you automate some of the mundane social media tasks and drastically reduce the amount of time you need to spend on marketing your brand on social media.

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