Social Media Platforms

In 2019 there are so many social media platforms it’s imperative that you have a social media strategy.

When you are working on your strategy you need to work out which of the platforms is best suited to your business.

Some of the platforms are more suited to a particular type of audience. Therefore, you really need an understanding of the Platform and the platform demographics, and the geographic region they operate in.

Once you have done this you can build it into your strategy.

This article will focus on which social platforms are best suited to a supplement brand. I’m also going to detail how I intend to update them and with what sort of content.

Why Have a Social Media Strategy?

Why do you need to do this?

If you just use the scattergun approach to marketing, you will be wasting not only money but valuable time. I’ve said it before and I am sure I will say it again, businesses need a laser focus and that applies doubly to marketing because get it wrong and you might as well have made a bonfire out of that bag of cash you have used.

Here are the main Social Media Platforms; FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr, YouTube, Flikr, Reddit, Whatsapp, QQ, Weibo, Quora, Digg, Viber, and Periscope.

The list goes on, remember MySpace and Google+ ?

Now look at the list, do you know how these platforms work, and do you know the demographics for those platforms or even the geographic region they operate in?

To get to my point, when you create your Social media strategy, you should work out which of the social media platforms will be useful to you and then create a strategy based on how the platform works and the demographics. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube will be obvious, the others probably not so.

In the case of Super Greens where in the UK 77% are under the age of 25 and 78% of 18 – 24-year olds use the platform, spending time energy, and money advertising to a Platform that with a demographic like that doesn’t make sense.

The key with your marketing is to understand your audience and understand the platforms and have a laser focus on the ones that have obvious benefits to your business. If you were selling trendy T-shirts, then Snapchat would probably be one of your main channels.

Looking at the current social media data available to highlight which social media platforms are best to be focused on, and importantly why.

Because the content for each social media platform differs you will need to produce and curate content for each of the channels you use.

In my case, I will go through why I will be devoting resources to a particular platform.

Most Popular Social Media Platforms in Use Today

According to Statista, Facebook is the most popular social media platform globally in 2018, which I’m pretty sure you already knew.

AN interesting fact, that these days Zuckerburg and Bezos have more people consistently logging in than Google with 57% for Facebook and Instagram and 33% for Google and YouTube so you should always consider Facebook and Instagram as serious options for your advertising.

Up to you, but I don’t think you can say this, your sentence is saying searches not logins.

Looking at the top 10 in the list above there were some surprises. Although thinking about it QQ and Qzone are owned by Tencent and given the population of China then maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that they were more popular than more familiar platforms like Twitter and Reddit!

As I will be marketing and selling primarily to customers in the US then it’s safe to say QQ and QZone won’t be on my list of advertising platforms.

I am focussing my target audience in the USA though. So, what are the demographics for social media platforms in the USA?

According to G2 Crowd, 77 percent of the US population has a social media profile, it’s no surprise that the most popular platforms are the usual suspects of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc. (Google+ is closed)

You should check out the G2 article as they do a great job of outlining each social media platform, their history, and their current user base.

Whilst this article gives you the overall usage statistics, you also need the demographic data, I got my info from Sproutsocial.com.

What Social Media Platforms Should I Use?

There are two factors to consider when choosing your social media platform.

What are these two factors?

1. Best platform for my audience to get engagement
2. Return on Investment (ROI)

When you create your “Social Media Strategy” it’s important you identify your target audience, for me, this is between 35 to 55, once you have this stat then you can then work out which platform best suits your demographic.

Hootsuite has an article that breaks down the demographics for each platform, you can see it below.

So looking at the table above the interesting stats are that 78% of 30 to 49 years use at least one social media platform and the figure remains relatively high at 64% for between 50-64 years old.

The PEW Research Center further breaks down social media usage by age group to show that 78% of 30-49-year olds use Facebook and 40% use 40%.

Therefore taking into account my target demographic this is a strong indicator that Facebook and Instagram are the platforms I should be targeting.

What Social Platforms should you register Your business with?

When setting up a new brand or company it makes sense to register on all the popular social platforms. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, even if it doesn’t look like you will need that platform.

This is because platforms and products change, much better you spend the 20 minutes getting your business name on the platform now than to find that 2 years later you have a product that fits in with a different platform but someone else registered that name 6 months ago.

When you register you should also take the time, to upload your brand logo to each platform and your website URL. Think about it, anyone coming across your brand on that platform will at least have some information about who and what you are.

I’ve put more information on the different formats and sizes for each social platform a little later in this article.

Why Use Social Media for Brands?

This may sound like a silly question because it’s obvious, isn’t it?

But seriously you should ask yourself why are you using social media for your brand?

Specifically ask yourself;

• Is it simply brand exposure?
• To get more sales?

If we look at some of the popular Green Supplements on the market today, it’s clear they leverage their social media audiences to build a community and build a tribe of like-minded people.

It is the sense of community and belonging that helps keep people returning because, with supplements like Super Greens, an important part of your business is returning customers.

One of the best examples today is Organify, The founder Drew Canole has a loyal following back from the days of being a huge advocate of juicing for health. He has over 500k Youtube subscribers on his fitLife TV channel.

His videos are engaging and his personality shines through when discussing everything from healthy eating, mediation to exercise routines. You can be sure he is a hit with many of his female audience, and most likely a lot of guys too!

Drew built his social media presence and audience before creating his Organify supplements. Drew, therefore, was able to leverage this power very quickly into making sales.

For myself and anyone else that doesn’t have have a strong pre-existing social media presence, your marketing approach will have to be a bit different from the Organify approach.

To get an audience of “hot and engaged” people take a considerable amount of time and energy, not to mention a spot-on message that resonates with your audience passionately. I won’t lie, to do this well is not an easy task and for me this was quite daunting

This probably also explains why so many companies use social media simply as a way to notify potential customers and not so much as a way to engage visitors to build a following.

A funny Video of how to build a following:

Branding Social Media Channels

As I said earlier, I would give you the correct sizes for your branding for your social platform. Getting sizing right is important because your brand needs to look as professional as possible.

Think about it, would you buy premium products from a shop that had a sign hanging down?

Unfortunately for you, there is not one consistent size for the social media platforms, and you will need some creative input and cropping to get these your branding looking good. Personally, I would always advise anyone starting out with their branding that they should take into account all of the social media platforms when building your logo.

Here are the media sizes for the social media platforms I promised earlier.

What Content Will You Posting to Social Media?

A reminder here make sure you sign up to all of the major social media platforms, it’s only 20 or 30 minutes of work.

There are 5 Types of Social Media Content

I would advise you to split your social media content into five types and mix them up to avoid making your posts looking stale:

• User generated Content (UGC) – Lifestyle images that resonate with target audience. You can do things such as show your product in nice scenario, which is a great way to boost engagement
• Customer testimonials (picture and video) – Great social proof from existing customers. Can also interview brand ambassadors to leverage their audience
• Curated content – Useful shareable content from the internet (useful articles, recipes, “facts”)
• Infographics – Everyone likes an easy way to read useful statistics and this can be a great way to do it.
• Guides – Helpful information that can help my target audience with health and nutrition

Check out socialmediatoday.com

Keep in mind that user-generated content (UGC) in the form of lifestyle images will be the most time consuming to produce.

One of the most important points to understand and to adopt when forming a social media strategy is to create social media content that contributes to your business goals

As a friend of mine keeps saying don’t post fluff, if the content has little to no value then you aren’t giving someone a reason to be a follower – so no posting fluffy or cat pictures, the internet has enough of these already! Unless that is your followers are cat lovers.

It’s important to keep in mind that the aim is to create social media content that that’s likely to boost your conversions, so in my case, help to promote my Super Greens supplement as a lifestyle choice.

How to Manage Your Social Media Platforms?

Managing one social media account can be a handful, so managing several can be a full-time job. For my product I won’t have the time or staff to manage this, therefore I need to make sure I am realistic and mindful of how much can be achieved by one person.

The good news is you don’t have to be around posting content every day and night, because you can schedule content to be released as and when you want. Better still some programs will post to the different platforms, so when you schedule a post for one platform you adapt it for the other.

There are many tools you can use to manage your social media and here is an article that goes through 15 tools that can really help you.

The big names include Hootsuite, Hubspot, Tweetdeck, IFTT, and Buffer.

I’m going to use Buffer, I like the fact that it is really straight forward to use. You can even set up a tool called Zapier to trigger updates on other platforms – I use this when integrating my US fulfillment company.

One thing I have noticed that really helps with this blog is planning.

Content planning takes the stress out of writing for me, so each week I know what content I would like to write about and why.

Whether I am writing about creating my supplement blueprint or doing lifestyle blog articles, I have a list of content with an indication of the progress (percentage complete or live).

Therefor using exactly the same approach makes sense for when I create my social media content. I then plug my content into Buffer to schedule the content at least 1-2 weeks ahead of time.

Key Social Media Metrics

When you have your social media platforms registered and have set up your branding, you’re posting content, and slowly but surely you are attracting more subscribers.

How do you now measure how successful your social media strategy is?

The answer is, you have a set of key metrics that you regularly measure to gauge the effectiveness of your content.

Key metrics include; channel likes, total shares, conversion rate to brand site, and brand mentions.

The Bottom Line

When I look at the demographics it’s quite clear that the platforms, I need to put my time, energy, and money into our Facebook and Instagram. This doesn’t mean I will ignore Twitter or Pinterest, I will still post to those platforms, but the bulk of my energy will be with Facebook and Instagram.

For me, my next task is to start producing and curating the content. It’s possible to do a lot of this in one go and then use tools such as Buffer to schedule posts. When posting it’s important to map out your posts, with regards to your aim of the post.

When you have posted then your next task is to look at your social media metrics and to track the effectiveness of the social media strategy, if you don’t measure this then you run the risk of not knowing early that you need to change your strategy.

Creating the content for your Social Media should be with one aim, and that is increasing engagement with visitors and existing customers. This will then boost conversions which equals MORE SALES. Either through either new purchases or re-orders from existing customers.

There will be a follow-up post looking at examples of the different types of social media content. Let me know any questions raised in this article.