How to select the right social media channels for your business

Avatar-Foto Laurence Decaux - 16th Jun, 2022

Many organisations approach social media with a sinking heart at the outset. It can feel either pointless, with anonymous corporate content, or undisciplined and risky.  

Ballou provides social media marketing for tech companies, and we work with organisations to help them bring their social media under control.  

The first step in working with tech social media services provider is to identify your goals, and then which platform you are going to use for which purpose. Sharing everything in the same format across everything from LinkedIn to TikTok simply will not work – just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.  

As tech social media consultants, we’re here to help. Let’s start with your aims: 

What are you trying to achieve?

Social media for the most part may be a short-term thing to get a short message out there, or part of a long-term strategic mission. Ask yourself the following questions – who do I think my audience is and where are they?  Is my content resonating with my audience?  What are my top 3 business objectives of this year and how could social media help with each?  

Now, let’s think about what you are going to use social media for.  Here are just a few of your options…  

Employer Branding

Employer branding is essential for increasing engagement and helping to build a community.

Leverage social media to express employees’ value; showcasing employees’ experiences creates unique content. 

Employee advocacy is vital for this social strategy, sharing employee stories and highlights increases employee engagement and employee generated content (EGC). Statistically EGC will get 10 x more engagement than a branded post, because on average, employees have more followers. 

Recruitment

EGC really helps to humanise social media and adds authenticity. This is attractive for new talent, as well as prospective clients. 

By creating engaging content around client and staff insights you can build an image of yourself as an aspirational employer.  

Use features like IG stories, Reels, articles and hashtags. 

Increase Leads 

Leverage social media to help drive more users to your website and create engaging content that points to specific pages that will be beneficial for them.  

Articles and video in particular help drive more users to the website and has been proven to achieve high engagement. Combining video with strong calls-to-action (CTAs) is a great way to achieve an increase in organic traffic to your website. 

Consider leveraging C-Suite and senior staff accounts on LinkedIn to create posts with clear CTAs and open-ended questions that will help position you as an authority within your industry.  

Diversify content 

And now, let’s think about fully utilising each platform’s intended content formats and creating exciting social posts that will resonate with the desired platform’s audience and algorithm. 

Interacting with all the features that these platforms offer is a powerful way of increasing engagement. So, what do they offer? 

Instagram 

Instagram is the ideal place to share photo and video content that gives insights into your business, and the wider community. 

To create more engagement on stories, content needs to be interactive. Open-ended questions, polls and opinions all give followers an opportunity to join in.  

IG stories, IGTV and IG live allows you to create interactive content with staff and investors to help humanise the account and create high performing content. 

It is now possible to run ads on Instagram and upload product inventory to the database allowing your followers to purchase directly from the brand without leaving the platform. 

Facebook 

Facebook is the grandad of social media and is now considered somewhat passé from a business perspective.  Many brands are seeing a negative impact on Facebook unless they are in a position to invest heavily in it.  

Facebook should not be dismissed entirely, however; its ad platform is extremely effective and is great for leads and conversion because it boasts the biggest audience online.  (In fact, to place an ad on Instagram you need a Facebook account).  From an organic growth standpoint Facebook is negligible, but a listing page and advertising can work well.  

Twitter 

Twitter is the best platform to engage in conversation, whether as an individual or a brand. 

Twitter’s tools such as re-Tweets and likes grow presence and maintain involvement in the community. This is also a fantastic platform to share relevant industry news and articles, staying on top of industry trends and also sharing your own longer form content like blogs. 

Twitter is a place for community and for building trust, so sharing investment updates and creating infographics around investment highlights will work well on this platform. 

LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is the best network for professionals to add credibility, become recognised as experts and interact with the wider community. This is the place to showcase your credentials and unique offerings to help establish your company’s presence within the investment space. Use your company page to share industry news, company news, highlights and internal developments such as personnel and projects. 

Your content style on LinkedIn will be business focused, as this is where you will connect with other professionals in the industry and their communities. This is a great platform for communicating with investors specifically and a strong B2B strategy here will engage with the audience you are trying to attract. 

The platform is especially useful for hyper targeting, allowing you to get granular in terms of content you receive.  

TikTok 

TikTok’s demographic is extremely young.  Its algorithm is aggressive; by that we mean it remembers every one of your search terms, the algorithm will track your interactions and tailor the ‘For You’ page to only show you content you’re most likely to engage with. 

In terms of advertising, it has the lowest CPA (Cost Per Ad) of the social platforms.  

If teens are your target audience, this TikTok is the (very powerful) one for you.  

Medium 

Medium specialises in hosting long form written content, making it basically a social network for article writers. You don’t need to be a subscriber to engage with a writer’s content, this is powerful for tapping into new audiences. 

Our final piece of advice?

Don’t try and drive followers to you, but find out where your followers are already, go there and set up camp.    

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