By Mark Schaefer
What are the most important social media platforms for business?
One of the most common business dilemmas is figuring our where to start with social media marketing. Today I would like to introduce a few high level ideas to help you decide where to put your time for the best results for your business. As with anything in life, there is often a trade-off between effort and business benefits and social media is no different.
I need to make a very important point right up front. There is NO common solution or strategy that fits every business. What I am proposing here should not be taken as “The Gospel.” This post contains broad generalizations — you still have to use common business sense to determine what fits best for you. OK? Let’s get started.
The ultimate goal
There are lots of amazing things a business can do to create benefits from the social web — customer service, business intelligence, and creating awareness to name a few. But today I want to assume that your primary goal is to create an actionable audience — that is, develop an online community who will create some business benefit for you over time.
Let’s cover a few key concepts about building that actionable social media audience:
Weak links versus strong links — A common misconception is that “audience” equals “action. It does not. If you are reading this post, you might have discovered it through Twitter or Facebook. But if you have no emotional connection to me as a blogger, are you going to hire me? Buy my marketing books? No. Social media marketing simply opens up the door for connections through weak relational links. You still have to do the hard work to turn those folks into buying customers.
Reliable reach — My friend Jay Baer coined a term I like very much: “reliable reach.” If you tweet something, it’s kind of like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean, isn’t it? You don’t really know who will read it … or if anyone will. However, if somebody subscribes to a blog or YouTube channel, they are asking for your content. There is a good chance they will actually see it. The goal of social media marketing is to direct more audience member to subscriptions — reliable reach — over time, There is generally a relationship between the time you put into social media and the level of reliable reach you attain.
Role of content — Content is the catalyst that leads to awareness on the web. Awareness may then lead to engagement and engagement may lead to trust, and even loyalty over time. Creating, curating, and distributing content is the economic driver of social media success. The different platforms require different types of content, some simple, some complex. This is important for a business to consider.
What are the most important social media platforms for business?
The default position for social media marketing seems to be Facebook. While Facebook is undeniably important, let’s stack it up to the other platforms in the context of our ultimate goal of building an actionable audience. In this analysis, I am covering the top social media platforms based on visits, plus a few others like Slideshare and Meerkat for fun. Here’s my analysis:
If you were to draw an arrow from the lower left quadrant (low time required, low audience ownership) to the upper right quadrant (high time required and high audience ownership), it would also present a useful continuum of the less complex content to more complex content requirements. Let’s look at each platform starting roughly from the lower left to the upper right.
But keep your eye on this space. I think over time, these platforms will improve in their ability to create reliable reach as users figure out creative new uses for regularly-scheduled programming and even integrating with traditional media. Of all the platforms listed here, I think this one has the most potential to shift to the right in terms of sustaining an actionable audience.
Twitter stands alone in its ability to create a huge, relevant audience quickly, but since you cannot target groups of followers with messages (at least yet), it sometimes feels like you are throwing a message out to a big silent world. The platform is great at making initial connections which can lead to reliable reach on another platform like a blog or podcast.
Despite the cries of its stalwart defenders, Google+ is not a mainstream public platform. Most people simply don’t care about the SEO benefits. It’s never mentioned on TV, you don’t see businesses asking for a follow on G+, and it’s not on the radar screen of Millennials. So your access to mainstream consumers is extremely limited.
However, G+ is still powerful in its ability to create passionate communities of fans who rally around a cause, a subject, or a person. There are wonderful communities dedicated to photography, cars, and tech, for example. You can certainly build an actionable audience on G+ but the platform trends toward the left on the chart because of its limited scope.
- To really succeed, you must be a conversational brand, or become one (not easy or cheap).
- It takes a lot of money and effort to build an audience — but then Facebook keeps you away from them. Facebook severely limits access to your audience. Read this post on the decline in Facebook organic reach to learn more about that.
- While Facebook seems simple (and free!) it’s not. To get your content on to a timeline, you probably need to spend a lot on quality, promotion, or both.
If you are celebrity or a beloved and established brand in your community, Facebook might be ideal. If you are a regional company that hauls hazardous waste, maybe not. For that reason, it’s difficult to put it in any one place on this diagram. There are so many complicating factors.
For those who have not been able to patiently build a dedicated blog community, this is an amazing opportunity, and scores of people are finally finding an audience for their work. The main limitation is that this is a business site. You probably aren’t going to publish about your favorite sports team or restaurant unless there is a business lesson behind it. And of course, ultimately, LinkedIn still owns the audience.
You would be right on both counts. HOWEVER. I am writing this from the perspective of corporate marketing success. Let me give you an example of how difficult this platform is to master.
Disney recently hired well-known Snapchat artists to create snaps throughout their park over a 24 hour period. It was a great success and Disney garnered 50,000 new followers from the stunt. So the first lesson is that it takes some effort to attract new followers. The second lesson is, the art created for this program was not easy, not cheap, and it lasted just a few moments, never to be re-purposed again. The final point is … now what? Once Disney had the new followers, how are they going to keep that edgy millennial art going to sustain the gains? Snapchat is fun and easy unless you’re a brand marketer. Success requires an in-the-moment style of goofiness not smiled upon by the corporate attorneys.
Slideshare has the potential for incredible reach to an entirely new audience. But it is also very difficult to be successful because there is a certain art involved in telling a compelling visual story through slides. You need the content, the images, the great story. It can’t be too short, it can’t be too long. You can’t really DIY it on the graphics. And the Slideshare audience is still limited, by far the smallest platform covered here, which is why audience ownership is limited. Only 15 percent of marketers are actively using it.
Still, it is growing, owned by LinkedIn, and highly indexed by Google. If you put in the work there is lots of opportunity to build a presence that leads to an actionable community especially if your competitors aren’t there yet.
- You generally must create original, distinctive content to stand out. Not easy. Not cheap.
- The opportunity for reliable reach is unprecedented because people subscribe to your content. In other words, not only do they consume it, they expect it.
- Consistently publishing a blog, video series, or podcast allows you develop important, loyal connections over time. These are people specifically interested in you and they are actionable.
- There are virtually no limitations to the type of audience you can reach.
- You own the content. It is permanent and can be re-purposed for years.
- This represents a proprietary audience accessible by you.
Under certain circumstances, you can build a relevant, actionable, passionate audience on any of these social media platforms. However, for most businesses, the engine for social media success begins with the “rich content” provided by a blog, video series, or podcast. An investment in this content also provides an opportunity for massive exposure compared to a simple tweet of Facebook post.
What are the most important social media platforms for business?
Again, I’d like to emphasize that there are many more opportunities within these platforms than I could cover in a short, generalized blog post. There are many exceptions to these “rules.” But I hope presenting this in the unique perspective of effort versus audience has been useful and thought-provoking. The comment section is yours!
Top illustration courtesy Flickr CC and Mah Nava. Chart created by Schaefer Marketing Solutions Copyright 2015.