What social media platform should you start with when you first start your business?
When you first start your business there are a lot of overwhelming details. Deciding which social media platform that best suits your business is one of them. Eventually, being on all social media platforms should be the goal. If you try and take on all platforms at one time you’ll get burnt out in a quick hurry.
Who is your target market?
There are a few things to consider when you’re getting ready to launch your social media account(s). If your business is aimed toward millennials and younger, Instagram is your best option. While there are a lot of millennials on Facebook as well, its users have a greater number of older active users than Instagram. If you’re not aiming toward any certain age group, facebook would be my first recommendation.
Instagram is a great place to show off your photography and interesting behinds the scenes content. It’s perfect if you are aiming toward a younger audience and would like to advertise with Influencers who have a large following. Utilizing hashtags, interesting captions, and great photography is very important. You can read all about curating your Instagram brand here.
Having a Facebook page can almost replace having a website as a brand new business. It has all your contact information easily visible. You can choose different layouts for your business page depending on what will suit your specific needs best. You can even book appointments through your page and link your page to messenger so you get notified instantly when someone is trying to reach you. Another thing that has great potential with facebook over Instagram is the ability to create a larger sense of community with facebook groups. Linking a Facebook group to your page for your dedicated customers can be a place where you offer exclusive behind the scenes content, discounts, sale announcements, and more. Creating a sense of exclusivity is important to drive people to join the group. Who doesn’t want to be the first to know about sales?
Twitter and Pinterest
While Twitter and Pinterest have a place, they wouldn’t be beneficial for you to incorporate in your social media management right away. Pinterest is a great way to drive people to your website, but if you don’t have a website that doesn’t really help much. You can have it drive traffic to your facebook page instead if you want to, but it just doesn’t seem like a good way to spend your time until you have an actual website. Twitter is a good place to get/give official statements from a business on an allegation made against them or their take on current events. It’s also a good way to go viral quickly if you are good at one-liners, retweet on repeat and bam! Your name is out there.
Ok, so what do you recommend?
I recommend having a facebook and Instagram account for your business for starters. You can pretty easily repurpose the same content on both platforms at the beginning before you have specific content planned out for each one. A question I would ask you to help dial down what’s best for you is what platform do you spend the most time on personally? That tells you which one you identify with the most and which one you should focus most of your time on in the beginning.
Still feel like you need help dialing things down? Book a session with our social media specialist to help you make the best decision for your goals.
