Nike rules Instagram with more 90 million followers while Coca Cola triumphs on Facebook with 107 million followers and Lego leads the YouTube game with 9.79 billion views.
It is interesting to see how these brands have not just aced their content game but have also hit the right chord with the crucial element of deciphering the Platform. People seem to have assumed that all brands must be on all social media platforms. And to top that, brands have a misconception that they must be present on all Social Media platforms. Let’s break this misconception once and for all. A brand need not be on all social media platforms. It is in fact necessary for brands to identify platforms that would be ideal for them.
The question is ‘How?’
Well, firstly it depends upon the audience that you are targeting, your products or services, and digital marketing objectives as well as the budgets that can be allocated to the digital spectrum.
Here are some questions you must ask yourself before choosing a platform for your brand:
What is your Objective of entering the social world?
There has to be a very simple answer to this question. Is your brand on social media in order to generate sales or for the sake of presence or perhaps in order to create brand awareness.The first step of entering the social world is by answering a simple ‘Why?
What are you selling?
Your products or service cannot be sold in all stores. For instance, think of Nike shoes being sold at a grocery store. Of course, that doesn’t make sense. In the same way Gucci making a presence on TikTok is absurd. The products and services that you are selling are crucial to the decision of the platform that you are choosing.
Who is the Target Audience?
While identifying the most suitable platform, target audience plays a major role. These platforms help brands reach out to a certain segment of people and no brand wants irrelevant audience. Hence, it becomes crucial for brands to identify the people that they aim to reach out to.
While choosing the right platform for your brand, you must take various criteria like demography, psychography, locations and gender into consideration. The right platform for your brand would be one that caters to all these criteria.
What is the format/medium that would be ideal in reaching out to your audience?
With the products and target audience in place, you need to understand what would be the best way to communicate with the audience. If we are looking at a young crowd, it is less likely for them to indulge in content that has too much reading, but it is more likely for them to indulge in micro videos.
There are different ways in which one can experiment with the format and communicate with their audience. And the accuracy in understanding your target audience would help you decipher the code of the format.
Once you have cracked the code with these questions, you might be onto something. But the race doesn’t end here. With every platform, you need a certain skill set. These skills would help you develop content that would help your brand ace the game. But, about that, some other day!
Until then, choose wisely!