Fish where your fish are.
Social media marketing takes a lot of work. Make that a ton of work. You don’t want to invest all that effort to find out your ideal clients don’t even “swim” in the social media sites you chose.
So let’s take a look at the make up of some of the major social media sites and consider if those sites match your typical customer profile.
Facebook is the “big daddy” of all social networks. It’s just really big. It has about 1.2 billion users. That means the old (2 years ago) digital marketing comment about “if Facebook were a country it would be bigger than…” is starting to be irrelevant as Facebook is just about bigger than any country in the world.
Because Facebook is so large it’s becoming a lot like the “middle of the bell curve”. Its demographics are becoming much more like a broad cross section of the world—much more so than when it was young.
According to Pew Research, 71% of online adults use Facebook. According to Mashable and Online MBA, 57% of Facebook users are women and 43% are men.
What stands out more is that 46% of Facebook users are 45 years of age or older. So Facebook is definitely no longer a college hangout.
Summary: Facebook covers nearly everyone’s customers. It’s so big it’s hard to ignore but there could be other social networks that nail your ideal customer more exactly. When on Facebook make sure you target your message, or at least your ads, to your specific target audience.
Twitter has 240 million users with 18% of online adults using it so it’s definitely more niche than Facebook. 59% of Twitter users are female. Research from Pew shows Twitter tends to skew younger than Facebook with the most likely to use it being in the 18-29 range however most age ranges are well represented.
Summary: Twitter is hard to ignore but with its younger leaning it may not fit if you know your audience skews older.
Pinterest now boasts 70 million users. It’s been one of the fastest growing social networks for the last few years. Pinterest is demographically easy in that it skews heavily female, a whopping 80%. The majority of users fall within the 25 to 34-age bracket (27.4% of users), followed by the 35 to 44 demographic (22.1%) and the 18 to 24 demographic (17.3%).
Summary: if many of your ideal clients are women, you really need to take a serious look at Pinterest.
Linkedin is pretty large, 259 million users. It’s an easy one too as it’s pretty much the platform when it comes to business-to-business marketing and not in the game for business-to-consumer marketing. It’s particularly strong when it comes to marketing and selling to mid-size and large corporations.
Summary: if your targets are corporations, especially larger ones, Linkedin is a must.
Google+
Google+ is actually very large with 300 million active users. There’s a fair bit of discussion about how well engaged people really are with the social network though.
Google+ is becoming important for search. There’s evidence links from Google+ are being counted as full credit links from a search standpoint, which is different to the way links from Facebook and Twitter are counted. Given this, it makes sense to get on Google+ and post content for links back to your site…and maybe that’s a factor in why the number of Google+ users grew 58% between May and Oct 2013.
Summary: you should consider being active on Google+ even if it’s just for SEO reasons.
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