Picking the right social platforms for your company

​I recently attended an event where one of the speakers made an off-hand remark that implied LinkedIn company pages aren’t worthy of our attention or effort. The audience had a good chuckle, but I found the remark strange because Hodges has seen some great results for clients using LinkedIn for sales, recruitment and marketing.

Whether or not LinkedIn is to your taste, responsible marketers owe their clients the best advice they can give, and for some clients, you may find that LinkedIn is a great fit.

Here are a few questions we ask our clients (or ask ourselves about our clients) to help guide the platform decision process.

Who’s the audience?

Though there are areas of overlap, the various different platforms have cater best to different populations. Facebook is the biggest player, with the broadest userbase, but it may be harder place to find an audience receptive to your goals.

What’s the content?

While visual content performs best across the major platforms, many businesses struggle to generate or find compelling and relevant visual content. Whatever services you pick should work well for the kind of content you can provide.

What’s the ultimate goal?

More than anything, your social media program needs to support your marketing goals, and different platforms have different strengths in different areas. A company selling consumer goods to a broad audience will necessarily have a different approach than a consultant looking for business leads.

What’s the budget?

Social media was never truly free in the first place, but it’s really, really not free now. Facebook has essentially killed organic reach in order to drive ad spending by companies, so you’ll have to spend money to reach even the people that already like your page. Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest all have ad products as well. If you plan to use a social media platform, you should plan from the beginning to support it with some level of paid promotion.

Ultimately, we should keep in mind that we’re investing in an online presence we don’t own and that can change drastically with very little notice. It’s important to put a program into place that can change with those platforms.