It is a very common problem, people make amazing products and then think it is very easy to get into social media. It is a general assumption that your success in social media purely depends on ‘page-likes’. I have got invites from friends to like pages which are of no interest to me and yet I ‘like’ because my friend would feel bad! And of course, most people hop on to the platform best known to them rather wondering where their target audience would be. So here are few tips you need to follow when you decide which one to focus on. Before we get to that – here is the golden rule. No, it is not appropriate to create one content form and circulate it across all platforms.

“Each social media channel has its own format for content. From the rule of hashtags and the size of the images – you need a different face to your story in different channels.”

Understand your Audience – If you are reading our blogs, you will come across this point almost everywhere. For, a business to thrive – it is imperative to understand its audience. You may have different sets of audience – for example – if you are a store selling handbags, you may have your buyer persona categorized into male and female. This is okay, and this is the reason why we are leveraging multiple platforms. But bucket each customer into a buyer persona and study the digital footprints of such personas.

Understand your Industry – If you are a clothing brand and most of your clothing brand are on Instagram, you might want to invest more there. But, if your competitors and industry is thriving on Twitter, then there is no point in wasting efforts on Instagram. If you are a generic brand and your industry shows trends across all platforms, then you will have to invest time on the research of each platform and work on each accordingly for choosing Social Media Channel.

Understand the Social Media Tools – If you are looking for social media tools, sorry to break it to you but different tools work differently for the social channels. Buffer may work great for twitter, but for Instagram buffer has its constraints. Tailwind works great with pinterest –and so on.

Understand your Media – ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’. That holds true for social media as well. But again, you need to use your images and storytelling wisely in each platform. While you can share every day, mobile clicks in Twitter, you may want to curate your Instagram wall with creative photos. While you can share a host of 60 second videos across channels, you can save your best ones for YouTube marketing and Highlights for Instagram. If you are witty and creative in writing than clicking photographs, a witty line on Twitter will gather much more attention than an everyday picture. If you can club both – nothing like it ofcourse.

Social Media is easy, and everybody is on it. The latest statistics is that there are 2.23 billion monthly active users on social media. It definitely is the mecca for marketers. You just need to research, experiment and learn every step of your way.