Cutting the Social Media Confusion
There’s nothing in the world quite like it and there’s nothing changing as quickly. Social media is constantly moving and transforming how we interact with our friends and favorite brands. Every day new functionality pops up on Facebook to help grow your business or a new shiny something on Instagram to attract followers. It’s hard to keep up and hard to understand where your business should be in the ever-changing social media landscape.
Instead of being everywhere and managing business pages for all the social media platforms, it’s best to start with where your customers are. Identify your target demographic and start with which platforms you think they’re on. If your target is women who like pairing food with their wine and finding new recipes, Pinterest is the place to be.
If your target is a younger demographic and you can create highly visual, beautiful content, Instagram is where you should start. Here are some stats from the big 4 to help you determine where your customers or potential customers might be found online.
• Facebook continues to be the most widely used social media platform, with 79% of American internet users.
• 68% of U.S. adults are on Facebook.
• 76% of Facebook users visited the site daily during 2016, with over 1.6 billion daily visitors, compared to 70% of daily usage in 2015.
• Facebook drives 23% of all website traffic.
• There are more than 500 million Instagram users (and growing daily).
• Instagram is the 2nd most widely used social media platform, with 32% of American internet users.
• 51% of Instagram users access the platform daily and 35% say they look at the platform several times per day.
• Younger demographic of users: 25% of users between 25 - 34 years old.
• 3rd most used social media platform, with 31% of American internet users.
• 93% of Pinterest users use the platform to plan or make purchases.
• Pinterest drives 25% of all retail website referral traffic.
• Pinterest has grown its user base by 50% over the past year and has 150 million monthly active users worldwide.
• Pinterest is a personal tool, not a social tool.
• 5th most used social media platform, with 24% of American internet users.
• Twitter drives only 1% of all retail website referral traffic.
• 81% of Millennials check Twitter at least once a day.
• 67% of users are likely to purchase from a brand they follow.
It’s easy to think that more is better, but more can be very hard to manage. Instead of trying to be active on every social media platform, pick 2 or 3 where you know your customers are. Do you like posting on those platforms and can you keep up with the content demands? If you don’t like taking pictures, Instagram probably isn’t one that you’ll want to manage long term.
Facebook is great for business basics, but there is so much more that Facebook can do besides engaging with your fans. To maximize potential, you really need to commit to digging deep and figuring out how to grow the reach on each post and understanding when it’s appropriate to boost a post or pay for advertising.
