What channels does my brand need?

With around 166 million daily active users and around 301 million monthly active users, who are spending at least 30 minutes on various social media channels a day, it can be a powerful tool for your brand. However, with so many people using it, you need to make sure you’re standing out from the crowd and doing it right.

Relevance

With a strictly B2B brand you may feel that channels like TikTok and Instagram aren’t right for you. In this case you’d need a LinkedIn page to really build up your brand and make yourself stand out as a key player.

As a customer-facing channel, if you’re selling a product, this will be perfect for you. Tiktok can help you reach the younger generation and both channels will help you showcase your products in a variety of ways, reaching a significant amount of people. As long as you’re using the right hashtags and sharing content people want to see.

However, don’t completely write off Instagram and TikTok if you’re B2B. The channels are saturated with content, yes and you may not have a product to sell. But instead of sharing what you do, you can highlight who you are. This will give your brand a personality and can be a great tool for hiring or showing the human side to your business. Potential clients and recruits might look at these kinds of channels to have a look at who you are, your company culture and any initiatives. Behind the scenes, fun campaigns and images of your staff will really stand out on this channel.

Audience

The average person had 8.6 social media accounts last year and the growth rate since 2015 is around an average of 12.5%. The highest spenders will be on Instagram, with 65% of users being between 18 and 34 years-old, whereas your business focused people will be purely on LinkedIn.

When building your brand, your target market is the first thing you need to research. Who do you want to sell to? Who do you want to put your content in front of? It’s up to you to make sure you’re not only making your product look amazing, but that you’re effectively highlighting the benefits of your products or services and showing why people need them.

If it’s purely business and networking you’re looking for, your preferred channel would be LinkedIn. Twitter can go hand-in-hand with LinkedIn. A great channel for sharing industry news, coverage you’ve secured and making you stand out as a thought leader by sharing your own thoughts on big issues. If you’re selling or want to give your brand a personality, then you’d look to Instagram and TikTok.

Purpose

When creating your brand, you also want to make sure that you’re offering something to your followers. Those who sell, sell, sell, tend to bore people and get them to switch off. You need to be clever and stay up to date with your target market and what content they like to see.

The purpose of your content should be clear in every post. Plan out what you want from each channel and then tailor your content to the plan. Are you trying to increase your following? Or are you trying to raise awareness of your brand? Are you using it to generate new customer leads? Or do you just want to generate engagement? These are all questions you need to ask yourself and pick the most relevant ones.

Knowing what you want to achieve puts you in a position to plan your content wisely and ensure your feed and messaging is both clear and consistent. There’s no point posting if you don’t know why or what you want to achieve. Realising this will also help you figure out the right channel for your brand.

Data

Analysing data regularly keeps you from losing followers and can help grow your channel. It can also be used to make sure you’re heading in the right direction. If you’ve researched your audience and know your purpose, you’ll have engaging content planned out. To make sure that your activity is helping you achieve your goals, you need to manage your data.

Each channel will provide analytics - showing you how many followers you’ve gained, how many you’ve lost, what content is doing well and what content isn’t. You can check this out to make sure that what your posting is relevant. If your data is showing you that you aren’t getting many followers, and nobody is engaging with your posts, then you may want to look at that channel and assess whether it’s worth any of your time.

Experience and Consistency

Before you start building your accounts, you need to ask yourself - do you have the resources to represent your brand consistently and properly online? Creating compelling content and engaging a community is a full-time job and some in-house teams just don’t have the time or the knowledge, wasting time sharing content that isn’t achieving any goals.

This can sometimes hurt your brand. If you’re posting a lot one week and then go quiet for weeks, your followers will sense that you don’t know what you’re doing and will switch off for channels that are regularly sharing engaging content. Consistency is key.

Do you need help?

You might think that bringing in external support will help or working with a consultancy to give you’re the knowledge and skills to implement a successful social media strategy. Working with an agency will free up your time and give you access to a team with the knowledge and tools to help you achieve your social media goals.

We come armed with ideas on how best to represent your brand and have the knowledge and experience to successfully achieve your goals. If you need support with your social media strategy, then get in touch with us today and see how we can help you.