Jake Prieur walks through four steps to pick social media platforms: find where your audience hangs out, consider where they'd expect to see you, match your content to the platform's format, and focus on where they're ready to buy. A plumber doesn't need TikTok if customers aren't there.
Have you ever heard this ridiculous statement before? Your business should be on every social media platform. Let me guess, you instantly felt overwhelmed, incapable and discouraged at the notion of having to create content for every social media platform. Even if you only focus on the big seven like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest and TikTok and disregard the other 45 plus social platforms, it's probably actually more now. This would be a suffocating in Denver. Let me put your mind at ease though. You do not need to be on every social media platform. In fact, you shouldn't be on more than three or four of them at any one time. But let me walk you through the best way to determine which platforms are best for your business. STEP 1 Where is your audience? Begin by asking yourself this. It's a simple question. Where would your audience be found? What I'd suggest is starting off with a checklist of all the different social platforms and put a little checkbox next to every one of the social platforms where your audience might be found. This is a great way to whittle it down from the 40 to 50 plus social platforms to maybe half as much, maybe 20, maybe even 10. If you think they'll be found there, keep them on the list. Then move on to step two. Where would your audience expect to find you? Better way of asking this where would your audience expect to encounter you? Just because your audience is on a platform doesn't mean that you should be too. So if your customer would be surprised, usually negatively, to see you on the platform, then that's usually a good indicator that you shouldn't be on there either. For instance, it's very unlikely that a client of a plumbing company would want to follow their business on Instagram. I don't know about you, but I do not want to see toilets and plumbing problems on Instagram. That's just something I don't need to see. Most people don't want to or expect to see pictures of broken toilets on Instagram either. All right, moving on to step three. Does your content fit the platform? Next, you'll need to determine if the content you're putting out fits the platform style and use. For instance, if your intent is to create how to plumbing videos fits the platform style and use. For instance, if your intent is to create how to plumbing videos, you likely won't fit on platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, or maybe even Twitter. These aren't really conducive to long form videos and therefore would be a waste of your efforts rather than you're more likely to be found on YouTube, maybe even on Tik Tok, where you've got little snippet of the step by step way of removing a clog from your toilet. So really consider does your content actually fit that platform? Good. Other good example is Twitter. You wouldn't find a plumber on Twitter because no one wants to read text based marketing from a plumber. All right, step number four. Where would your audience actually purchase or at least move closer, closer to purchasing? Finally, you'll want to ask yourself if your audience would make a purchase or get closer to making a purchase if they encountered you on that platform. If not, it's not worth investing time, money or energy on it if they would. On the other hand, then you've officially identified your short list of platforms to focus on, so you might find yourself let's use that plumber example. You might find yourself on YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. And that might be it. And so, rather than wasting your time being on every single platform, you've now effectively whittled it down to three. So next time you hear someone say you should be on every social media platform, you can rest assure knowing that you're on the right social media platforms.
