Matthew Paulson explains how businesses should choose which publishing/social platforms to use. Key advice: treat your website as the central hub, pick two-to-three platforms that match your audience (use competitor sharing buttons and SimilarWeb to discover where traffic comes from), and focus effort narrowly (80/20); he illustrates with his MarketBeat example (investors favor StockTwits over Facebook).
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Hey, everybody, Matthew Paulson here. I wanted to record a quick video that will help you determine what social media channels and what other publishing channels you should put content on. So obviously, you know, if you run a business, you'll probably have a website of some kind, but there are so many other platforms that you can choose from that you can decide to publish content on or not. You know, just to name a few. There's CreateSpace if you want to publish books. There's Facebook, there's Flickr, there's Google, kind of still around Google News if you're publishing news stories, there's Instagram, there's itunes. If you're publishing a podcast like I am, there's Kindle for ebooks. There's LinkedIn. There's Medium for written content. Periscope for live streaming, Pinterest for pictures and products. There's Snapchat for live content. There's Stitcher for podcasts. There's StockTwits for investing content. There's Tumblr for written content. Twitter for whatever Twitter does. There's vine for videos. Actually, vine just went away. There's also YouTube for video content. So you have a ton of different places you could publish content to that you could use to drive people back to your website. And it's really, you should not try to do everything, do not do everything, because you'll end up doing a lot of things very poorly. So really what you want to do is pick out kind of the two or three channels that are where your audience is and have the best shot of sending people back to your website. So really, your website will be the hub and then all these different channels will be spokes that send people back to your website. So your website will have all your products on it. It'll have your main content on it. It'll have all of your email opt in forms on it. And you want to use these channels to send as many people back to your website as you can. I think it's important to recognize that not every publishing channel is right for every business. Not everybody should have a YouTube channel. Not everybody should be on Facebook. So at MarketBeat, my audience is stock investors. So these typically tend to be older, more established people. It's more men than women. They're primarily people in the United States. They're people that are interested in investing. This audience is not well represented on Facebook. So we just don't do a lot of stuff on Facebook. I've tried Facebook ads before, but I can never get the lead cost below 10 or $15. And I can only afford to pay 2 to $3. So Facebook is not just not a good platform for me, but on the other hand, stocktwits is a great platform for me because it's a social network totally dedicated to investing. So we advertise on StockTwits, we publish our content on StockTwits, and we get great results from that. So really kind of identify what media channels that you're, you know, where are, you know, identify the media channels that your audience is on, then focus on those social media channels. So kind of a way to determine what social media channels your customers are on. A good way to do that is to look at what your competitors are doing and then kind of see what social sharing buttons do they have on their website. So if all of them have a Pinterest kind of share button on their website, you, you can probably get a pretty good idea that they are getting some traffic from Pinterest. Another way is to use a tool called SimilarWeb, that's SimilarWeb.com and you can go on that website and type in any domain and then it will show you what other websites send them a lot of traffic. So it will show you what social networks are sending them a lot of traffic. So if a website is sending or if Twitter is sending your website a lot of traffic, Similar web will reveal some of that information to you. They do have a free tier that you can check out. They'll show you the first five websites somebody gets traffic from. And then after that, most of their other features come from a paid subscription offering. So there are dozens of platforms you could publish to. But really kind of the 8020 rule applies. You only have so much time in a day. You can only do so many things. So really focus on those three or four publishing channels, maybe even two or three that are just the most relevant to your audience and to your business. Focus on those, maybe put placeholder accounts up on other things so somebody doesn't steal it. But you really need to focus in and just do two or three channels well and just kind of let everything else be put aside for the moment so that you just are focusing on your audience and getting people back to your website.
