There is certainly no shortage of social networks that you and your company can engage in. Even sticking to the most obvious networks (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest) can be too much to keep up with. But for some reason, we feel like we at least have to try.
The truth is, unless you have full-time staff dedicated to nothing but social media engagement, you’re going to have a hard time keeping up with even a handful of social platforms. That means, you’re going to have to choose which social platforms are worth your time, energy and efforts.
How do you start? Well, you can always throw darts at the wall and see which platform is “selected” but that hardly seems efficient. So you need to ask yourself a few questions:
- Which networks are more friendly to your type of business?
- Is your audience engaging more on any one network more than the others?
- Which platform will give you the best ability to reach a bigger audience?
These three questions will offer you a good filtering system for narrowing down your options.
Once you know where you want to focus your social media efforts, it’s a good idea to focus on only one network at a time before you move onto another. [Tweet This] This gives you an opportunity to build up a base and learn from any mistakes you make. No sense making the same mistake on every platform! Use what you learn on one platform so make the next one work more quickly and efficiently for you.
Starting with only one platform also ensures that your efforts will be the most effective. While having a broad reach can be beneficial, it’s better to do really well on one than to be only quasi-effective on many. Not only is that a good use of your time, it also let’s you more quickly see if your efforts are producing fruit or not.
If they are, great. Keep going and then move onto another platform. But if you aren’t seeing the results you want on that first platform, feel free to jump ship and put your efforts somewhere else.
Just don’t jump too early. Give yourself plenty of time to work out the kinks and really make your efforts work, or be completely sure they won’t work before you bail. Social presence building takes time. You likely won’t be an overnight success, but with time, you’ll find the networks that really work for your business.