Small Business Corner: Which social media platform(s) are best for your business?

Social media is pretty much essential. It has become a necessary time investment for every business to make.

However, you don’t need to use every single social media outlet on the planet. You’ll drive yourself nuts!

If you are just getting started with social media, first, find where your audience is:

• Facebook?
• Twitter?
• YouTube?
• Instagram?
• Pinterest?
• LinkedIn?

… and focus on one or two main social media outlets. You can always add more later, but you never want to have a “stale” social media presence. It will make your business look outdated. Nobody wants that!

The type of web content your audience looks for will help determine which social media channels you should be using.

If they’re after photographs – then Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook should be your primary focus.

However, if your audience is more video-focused, then building up your YouTube channel would make more sense.

Written content mainly gets engagements on Facebook, Twitter, and even Reddit or LinkedIn.

If you’re trying to post long-form written content (basically blog posts) on Instagram, then you’re going in completely the wrong direction.

You can tie in ads and offers on your Facebook or Instagram presences, and have a direct channel with your customers on Twitter. Networking on LinkedIn—both at the personal and company level—can be another way to help your business.

You can also obviously cross-post. This means if you have a YouTube channel, you can post videos from YouTube on Facebook or short video clips on Instagram – and you can ask your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter followers to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

If you need more business and you’re not already on social media – or if your platforms are stale – you should get started today! It’s better to start – and learn from any mistakes – than to not do anything!

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If you have any questions, please email [email protected].

– Contributed by Melissa Fassel Dunn.