How to Choose the Best Social Media Platforms for Your New Business - #36

Show Notes

You’ve launched your business and now you’re ready to turn it into the business of your dreams. Only catch; you need to attract the perfect audience. Without an audience pool — one that you truly understand and connect with — your business can’t survive. How do you find your ideal audience using social media? To help you understand the ‘why’ and ‘which’ social platforms are worth your time, Lori Vajda and Nola Boea came up with a business use case to help aspiring solopreneurs and small business owners make an informed decision. 

Listen in as they share their discoveries, insights and helpful tips so you can choose only the social platforms that make sense for your business, in today’s episode.

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In This Episode You’ll Learn

• How building an audience through social media can be challenging. But if you do it correctly, it can be wellworth your time and effort.
• Building an audience is important, but if you can't figure out how to generate meaningful revenue, is it worth your time in the long run?
• The one big mistake that leads many entrepreneurs scratching their heads wondering why they aren’t successful on social media.
• What you want is a process that will create meaningful interactions with your audience.
• Why no matter how great your messaging, it won’t make up for trying to send the wrong message to the wrong people.

Developing a business-building plan for social media can help you connect with your tribe. However, formulating a strategy that's bigger than just having a handful of meaningless posts at the ready - well that turns out to be the missing ingredient for most solopreneurs. As Nola and Lori found out during their research, the key is being able to clearly communicate the benefits (make me feel important) at that critical intersection between audience and offer, in order to be successful on social media. 

(3:07.89) The single biggest reason it is so difficult to get your social posts in front of your ideal customer. 

(6:06.86) Who uses the different platforms the most. How can you, as a business owner, really get the most bang for the time that you’re using a particular social media platform? 

(8:21.78) Customers are using social media platforms differently than in the past. As a result, you as a business owner could, unbeknownst to you and your business, make this critical mistake. 

(8:51:42) Three major advantages business owners have for connecting with their target audience on the right social platform for their business.

(11:29:23) You don’t need to be on every social media platform. Use these three tips for choosing the right social media platform for your business.

(13:47:95) The one social platform often overlooked by many businesses and business owners, and as such could give you an advantage for reaching your target audience.

(15:46:52) Five benefits of using YouTube to engage prospects and generate search engine content to your website.

(18:02:24) Three social platforms few business owners consider and could be missing out on engaging with prospective customers, especially if you have a niche business and audience.

Resources 

You can subscribe to Lori and Nola's show, (we love you and want to make it easy) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Tip Sheet - How to write for your social media community. Download available at here.

This episode was supported by: Be-YOU-nique

Transcript

Lori: [00:00:00] How do I choose the right social media platform for my business? We hear that question a lot. And if you read Forbes, Business News Daily, or other types of business articles, you might be of the opinion that if your business is not on social media, you could be missing out on an effective and free marketing tool. But is that really true? And if it is, are all social media platforms created equal? When it comes to social media, knowing what platform works best for your business. It's the topic of our show today,
 
Announcer: [00:00:34] You're listening to the Sticky Brand Lab podcast, where time strapped professionals like you learn how to create a business you love in as little as three hours a week.
 
Nola: [00:00:44] When it comes to social media, we often hear from two types of aspiring entrepreneurs. The ones that believe social media is a good marketing solution for driving traffic, so they want to be on all platforms. Or we hear from the ones who want to avoid all platforms, believing that it's a waste of time or that the ones making money are the owners of the platforms themselves. Hey, they're aspiring side hustlers and solopreneurs, Nola and Lori here with this social media reality check to help you choose the right platform for your small business. But before we do check to be sure you're subscribed to our podcast on apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, audible, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This will ensure you never miss a weekly episode as well as help other entrepreneurs like you find our show and create a profitable business they love. So, let's get this socially-engaging episode started
 
Lori: [00:01:37] When businesses first started using social media as a marketing channel, there was less content, less noise, and more people willing to click on almost everything they saw on their newsfeed. And I was one of those who got in on the ground floor. I worked for a fortune 100 company who hired three of us to pilot their social media for their business.  Back then, if you posted anything, it was more likely to show up not only in your feed, but everybody's feed that you were connected to. And really. Those days are long gone, but businesses and many businesses owners still post as if those days exist. Today, there are so many channels out there and so much information being shared on all types of platforms. We're all experiencing content overload. So, does that mean that social media for small businesses, a waste of time? Not at all, but the rules have changed. And so should the way you think about using social media for engaging prospects, customers and building your brand awareness.
 
Nola: [00:02:46] That's right. You see, even social media platforms like Facebook first started, it was all organic traffic. And by organic, we mean you didn't have to run targeted ads in order to get your post in front of prospective customers, eyes. Contrary to popular beliefs. This is not a direct result of platform owners wanting to make money, although that maybe a contributing factor. The real reason it's so hard to get your business post, or any post for that matter, in front of more people's eyes is because there is so much content out there that we just can't consume it all. To really grasp this idea. Let's say the number of posts published per day was 100 million. And all social media users out there were able to actually consume or read. 1 million posts per day. Each of those hundred million posts would have roughly a 1% chance of being seen.
 
Lori: [00:03:39] That sounds like a lot still.
 
Nola: [00:03:41] It does. Well, let's take a look at the real numbers. if you think that's a lot, Facebook alone gets 300 million photos uploaded every single day.
 
Lori: [00:03:51] I do 50 million of those, by the way, I'm just saying.
 
Nola: [00:03:59] And Facebook gets 500 million stories every day. I mean, it's mind boggling.
 
Lori: [00:04:06] I can't wrap my brain around that. I can't imagine just to take this. If you sat in front of Facebook for eight hours and just continue to scroll. You'd be getting that 1% of all of their posts that were out there, but that's all you would be able to do.
 
Nola: [00:04:22] Yeah, well, that's just Facebook. YouTube on average has about 400 hours of video uploaded every minute.  On Instagram. There are about 95 million photos uploaded every day.
 
Lori: [00:04:39] Yeah. And Twitter users post 140 million tweets daily, which adds up to a billion tweets in a week.
 
Nola: [00:04:51] Well, oh my goodness. So, to sum it up, the whole point of all these stats is there is a lot. Yes. A lot of content. I know that after you talk about a million, it's all just some nebulous numbers. The way I think about it is. Think of all of the posts as like, if I've gallon bucket of sand.  Well, this whole show today is about finding the right platform for your business, and getting the right platform is like having that grain of sand, instead of in a five-gallon bucket full of sand, is like having it in a teaspoon of sand.
 
Lori: [00:05:37] There are benefits of using social media and there are even more benefits if you select the right platform for your business. We probably intimidated people by talking about the numbers that are out there. And really, we want to reassure you. That's not the, the point of this. The point of this was to understand the value that you get, the benefits that your target audience can get from using it. And to give you some idea of what that is, we wanted to tell you who uses the different platforms the most so that you, as a business owner, can really think of, where would I get the most bang for the time that I'm using it? Let's start by just giving you a little information on how people use the different platforms to do research and shop. One great example of that is, Pinterest is visited by 2 million users who save shopping pins on their board every day, 130 million Instagram users tap on shopping posts every month, and 81% of those people use the platform to help them do research on products and services. Now, Nola, if I asked you which social media platform do you think is used the most for how-to videos? Which one would you guess that would be?
 
Nola: Well, that would be YouTube.
 
Lori: I did too, which is why the facts kind of took me by surprise. And as it turns out, how-to videos are most watched on Instagram by 80%. But you have to put that into context because Instagram is such a visual space for photographs, it's also perfect for people in the health and wellness and beauty industry, for yoga, for food or cocktails, because you're showing visually stimulating images. And so people then want to know, how do I do that for myself? So how do I use the different tools for cutting hair? Which many people did over the past year, learned the hard way, or got help through tutorials on how to cut hair.
 
Nola: [00:07:57] Cut hair? people still cut their hair? Just kidding. Nevermind. Scratch that.
 
Lori: [00:08:05] Here's another thing that you might be surprised to know, is that 18% of U.S. users made purchases through Facebook. The next place for purchases was Instagram by 11%.
 
Nola: Wow.
 
Lori: People have turned to social media for customer service or to get answers to their questions because it's instantaneous. We also have the expectation that if I send you a message, you're going to respond right away. Now, some people may see that as a negative, and that would be really an unfortunate situation. Because how often do you get the opportunity to engage with a prospective customer or a real customer in real time?
 
Nola: This is true.
 
Lori: What researchers have found is that buyers are more likely to use social media to engage, and they're more likely to write a positive review as well as a negative review, based on your response time, your tone, and could you help them resolve it. Which is really awesome. Social media platforms help to build your brand awareness. It helps you build a community of like-minded people. And it's great for lead generation. As those buyers who did the research, if a user sees something of interest, they're more likely to go to the source to check it out, or they're more likely to go check out the reviews for those products and services.
 
Nola: [00:09:40] Yeah. And as you had said, those reviews and the comments have a lot to do with how you engaged with them, positively or negatively, and how your attitude was. And was it consistent with your brand?
 
Lori: [00:09:53] You know, you'll see a lot of people who have been frustrated with airlines immediately go on Twitter. Or because some of them don't get as fast of a response on Facebook. So, when you use social media from a consumer standpoint, you think about it from that standpoint. Now you just have to look at it as a business owner where those opportunities are.
 
Nola: [00:10:17] There are actually benefits to engaging and to putting engaging content out there. The benefit of just putting out very high-quality engaging content that actually improves the algorithms of the social media platforms, which helps you reach more people. In other words, the more people that engage with your posts, the more social media algorithms take it as a sign that your post is interesting. And the more this helps future posts get in front of more of your target audience. In fact, Social Baker studied 30,000 Facebook posts by over 2,700 businesses and found that the more interactions a page has the higher the traffic to its website. And isn't that what it's all about?
 
Lori: [00:11:06] Exactly. And that's where people, I think miss a lot of the mark. Because they don't consider a few things really when it comes to not only creating posts, but understanding who they're creating posts for.
 
Nola: [00:11:20] Now, it's good to have engaging content, of course, but don't think that you have to be on every social media platform because you shouldn't.So, how do you decide which platforms to be on you begin by defining your target audience. Always know who you're talking to. So, the same kind of questions apply. What age groups are you trying to reach? Are these millennials? Are they baby boomers? How do they prefer to consume their information? So that's your target audience, but think about your actual buyers. And what challenge do my customers have that my product or service solves? This is going to be consistent in your messaging, including your social media messaging. Is my product or service affordable to my target audience? Showcase your product or service that fits the right budget.
 
Lori: [00:12:11] It's knowing that your audience is interested in that. In other words, don’t go with your highest selling ticket item when you're just getting to develop or getting to know who your target audience is, or they're just getting to know who you are, because the same parameters of they have to know you, like you, before they can trust you, still applies here.
 
Nola: [00:12:36] That's very profound, Lori.
 
Lori: [00:12:39] Well thank you, Nola. So how am I supposed to decide which platform is right for my business? Well, let's look at who are the actual users are the largest consumers on the different platforms to help you listener, make the choice that's right for you. We'll start again with Facebook. So, I know Facebook gets a really bad rap, but worldwide, there are 2.45 billion monthly users. Plus, this platform has the widest daily age range of users from 18 to mid-fifties. As the average midrange.
 
Nola: [00:13:28] From what I understand, their ads are actually pretty affordable compared to some of those other, some of the other platforms out there.
 
Lori: [00:13:35] Yeah. If you went to do Google ad-words or invest in SEO, which is using paid ads, you would have to spend an awful lot of money in order to do so. One underused social platform that many professionals, as well as business owners, neglect is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a lot of benefits to it.
 
Nola: [00:14:01] Because you know that there are only going to be business owners or professionals on that platform.
 
Lori: [00:14:06] Right. If you felt more comfortable giving facts, case studies, specific tips that help a business grow or a business professional, that's a great place to be it. Plus, they have a built-in publishing platform. I believe now you can even do live videos. You can hold events on there and you can do ads on LinkedIn as well. It's a really great for B2B and B to C that's the professional you're trying to target.
 
Nola: [00:14:38] And Instagram, it's a place where you can really put the human face, a human touch on your company. Basically, humanize your company. You can elevate your brand with images and videos, and really appeal to the 11% of shoppers. YouTube, on the other hand, is the world's second most popular search engine. It's not just a video platform. It is a search engine and it's the second most right after Google, which of course owns YouTube. One of every two internet users around the world uses YouTube, and on average spend 12 minutes every day, at least, well, average, watching YouTube videos
 
Lori: [00:15:23] Part of that is because of their, how to videos. You know, like, we were traveling and we, this might end up biting me in the butt, but we were trying to override an air conditioning system that had locked it at a certain temperature and the only way to figure out how to override the air conditioning system. So, we could get the temp lower, was YouTube, YouTube. So that's a different type of how-to video. And it's a great place for B2B marketing. More than half of businesses create organic content on YouTube and buy organic, just to clarify, what we mean by organic is it's not paid. You might pay somebody to edit your video, but the actual video itself, you do not have to pay in order to upload it to YouTube.
 
Nola: [00:16:17] And you don't have to pay to get people to watch. So, people are watching it because it's interesting.
 
Lori: [00:16:24] Did you know that many of the same ways that you do organic SEO, you use in doing your title, your write-up, all of those things with keywords. That's another benefit that many business owners are missing is that they're creating valuable content for search engines to find.  Another benefit of YouTube is that if you can't listen, you're in a place where you can't listen, you can turn on the caption so there’s that content which also favors Disability Act. So, people with hearing loss can read the caption and enjoy your video as much.
 
Nola: [00:17:07] And YouTube is also a big driver to your website.
 
Lori: [00:17:10] Because you can have that connected to your website. Now, one of the social platforms that kind of surprised me a little was Twitter. And that's because according to the numbers, 28% of Twitter users fall in the age of twenties to the thirties. However, 70% of users go to Twitter for news.
 
Nola: [00:17:35] Yeah, it just kind of organically turned into more of a news feed than a chit chat feed. And you figure, you've got business articles on there,
 
Lori: [00:17:46] Great for tips. Great for techniques. Great for taking things and capturing them in smaller sound bites. By that I mean, getting direct to the point. You're not writing lengthy articles; you're sending out basically think of it like a bullet list.
 
Nola: [00:18:02] We covered the main social media platforms and talked a little bit about how people use them. And there are a few social media platforms that you don't think of as social media platforms. Like Reddit. Now Reddit was around, has been around a long time, long before Facebook. It's more of a social forum than a social media platform. However, it's still a great place to find and interact and engage with your target audiences. It's useful for also gathering information, conversations, just learning about what that target audience is actually talking about. And since we're talking about who's on there right now, Reddit is more popular with men than with women.
 
Lori: [00:18:50] I think that's because of, it's more of a forum style. I think the numbers are slowly creeping up for women, but it's not the go-to by choice. When you have to think how and where am I going to look for the information that's important to me.
 
Nola: [00:19:06] Right. Since you mentioned it, Reddit communities are subreddits. So, there are a lot of subreddits in the Reddit platform. If you go looking, there's everything from news and politics to games, to SEO, to science. Believe it or not, they have a community, a subreddit for stupidity.
 
Lori: [00:19:30] Now his stupidity like stupid animal tricks, you know, stupid things that people do.
 
Nola: [00:19:36] I was not stupid enough to check it out.  Maybe that would have been something. I don't know.  But the point is there are thousands of subreddits. And if you look, you might just be able to find one for your niche business. That's what it's great for is niche businesses, because people want to talk about specific, specific things.
Lori: [00:20:04] Yeah, like there, if you were into coin collection or bourbon drinker, I could see that.
 
Nola: [00:20:12] Another social media platform that you don't think of as social media platform. Are platforms where people can give reviews. Because again, the whole point is that it's social and that you can engage. And one of those would be Yelp. Yelp is where people leave reviews. And if you have a paid subscription as an owner, you can actually engage with that reviewer. And then another one is Google My Business. Now that's evolved to where yes, you can post now.
 
Lori: [00:20:43] It is such an underutilized tool. You can literally post. You can do it daily and it's Google. So, between Yelp, between Google and Google Reviews and Google My Business, all of those things, feed search engines. You know, we've given some great benefits for businesses. We've talked about some different channels. So then how do you make a decision? Some questions that you want to keep in mind are, who's my target audience? Which platform do they use the most? And by the way, not only where do they spend the most time, what times of day? Get a feel for knowing what time of day people use different platforms can be of benefit to you. Also consider how your customer uses and consumes the information. Do they watch it? Do they read it? What kinds of content do you enjoy producing? Do you prefer talking like in a video, in a live stream? And think about how social media is going to support your business, your website. And how much time do you have? So, all those kinds of questions you want to ask yourself to get a better idea of which platform might suit you. And if you combine that, your answers with some of the suggestions and the numbers that we gave, you can usually match those up.
 
Nola: [00:22:13] Absolutely. So, to sum it up, here are four best practices to keep in mind: Use the 80/20 rule — 80% of your posts are going to be helpful, engaging fun information conversation; 20% of your posts will be very softly, self-promoting. And if you want people to enjoy engaging with you, you want to keep it 20% promotion. So, think engagement. You're not just posting, that's only one side of the coin. You're responding. You're creating relationships. You're having conversations. Also, be consistent.
 
Lori: [00:22:58] You know, there are a lot of tools out there that actually can help you to be consistent.
 
Nola: [00:23:03] It's very helpful. Facebook has one that's free to use. There are other services off there that will distribute to the various platforms. And when you are posting, when you do think about something to say, think about the fact that you're talking to, just maybe one person or a few. You're talking to your tribe. You're not talking to everybody else in the universe.
 
Lori: [00:23:24] That's right. If you think from one to one or one to a couple, your message gets very specific then. So. Another thing to kind of keep in mind in getting a realistic perspective is understanding how a customer's journey interacts with your business. Because oftentimes people think of it being very linear and it's, it's really not that way. Very, very few customers or prospective customers are going to go from your social media page to your website to purchase something and check out, or call you, or sign up, or whatever it is that they might do. It looks more, a little bit more like someone hears about your product or service, in a number of ways. That same day, the customer sees a post, enjoys the content and comments on it, because now they were informed about you. They were on the platform where you are. You posted, they got it in their feed. They saw it. You commented. The following week, let's just say the customer then does a Google search. And because many of these platforms rank in Google searches, so they're looking for a specific product or service, bam. Your Facebook post, or other type of posts, YouTube video, or even your website shows up in their results. And then she recognizes your brand, sends you a question about your product or service through your social media page. And of course, because you listened to this podcast, you know, to promptly reply, and she decides to do business with you and, and makes the purchase or schedules the appointment to talk to you via your website. Well, one of the things to keep in mind is that the average person needs at least seven touch points. And that list that I just read off, is each one of those are touchpoints to getting to you. So, if you think, how many times does somebody have, do I have to get in front of somebody and at the right time, in the right way at the right moment? And how that benefits you by being consistent again, by being engaging, by building a tribe that supports you, all of those things play into it.
 
Nola: [00:25:41] That corresponds with a study by Sprout Social that found that 85% of people have to see something on social media more than once before they purchase it. But they'll also unfollow you if you post too many promotional messages, like we said before. But yeah, you can't just post once and expect something to happen. That post is just part of a overall
 
Lori: [00:26:09] marketing strategy.
 
Nola: [00:26:12] You're engaging on social media, but you're engaging in other ways as well.
 
Lori: [00:26:15] Yeah. And I think it, when you take all of this into consideration, if you are the business owner and you think, well, where do I go for news and information, or where do I go to escape and not have to think about how the day is going, and I just want to have some fun? If you look at your own behavior of where you are and you match that with where your target audience is you're likely to enjoy social platforms more than find them cumbersome, burdensome, a waste of time, or any of the negative often negative attributes that people have.
 
Nola: [00:26:54] Really enjoy it. Get into it. Billy treasure, the conversations you're having.
 
Lori: [00:26:58] Yeah. And it's like everything. It takes time to find your voice, to find your brand, to put all of that together and make it work. But once you do the benefits, it's a long game. You have to think of social media as a long game in the same way that you have to think of starting a business, building a business and making it successful as a long game.
 
Nola: [00:27:22] Listeners, we hope you're encouraged to use the right social media platform for your business. And while you don't have to pay to use social media, time is money. So, choose wisely and post consistently to get the best results. By the way, we have a free gift for you. It's a one-page tip sheet, How to Write for Your Social Media Community. You can get it on the Resources page of our website at StickyBrandLab.com.
Be sure to come back next Tuesday and every Tuesday for another informative, inspiring and motivating episode. And remember. Action creates results. So, tap into your desire to create a business and brand you love by taking 1% action every day. Small steps, big effects.
 
Lori: [00:28:06] Do you have questions about creating a personal brand, side-hustle or small business? Sign up for one of our clarity sessions. For more information, contact stickybrandlab.com/contact.
 
[OUT-TAKE]
 
Nola: [00:28:22] We're going to talk about…things that you might need to know about…. I have no idea. Let's just, you know what? I don't want to do it now.