How many social media platforms should a business use?

THE FOLLOWING IS AN ADAPTED TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRECEDING VIDEO ON YOUTUBE – SECRETS TO INSTAGRAM FOLLOWER GROWTH

A few months back, I was working with a brand in their strategy for an exhibition they are running. Part of our marketing plan was to promote the exhibitors who would be at the event and mention them using their social media handles in the content we put out on social media.

So, we use Hootsuite to schedule our content. We have to plan because we have a lot of content going out all the time during the day. Putting out a lot of content has helped build massive brand awareness for our brands. Having a constant stream of content all day on a variety of platforms has been pretty useful. It works.

If you use Hootsuite, you’ll know that a few months or more back it stopped recognising ‘@ mentions’ for Facebook and Instagram. So now you can only at mention for Twitter. From a brand viewpoint, it is inefficient. Although, from my experience ”@ mentioning’ people on FB is not a huge loss. With the popularity of Instagram, it’s a must. You want people to know you are mentioning them, and you need to be able to schedule content with those mentions.

However, what was surprising was that a number of the brands who would be exhibiting preferred to be on one or two social media platforms. And, of those that were only on one platform, for the majority, Twitter was not their choice. It was quite common for these organisations to go on Facebook and Instagram.

Focus on Reusing Content

I need to schedule content. I manage too many brands not to be scheduling.

At the moment it’s cost-effective to use Hootsuite for our business. So two things are happening. One – our business runs into challenges mentioning your brand if you are not on Twitter. And, if you are a brand not utilising as many social media platforms as possible; and I recommend Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook as a minimum, you are limiting your audience reach.

Some of your potential customers only use Twitter. If you are only using Instagram, you significantly reduce the flexibility of the stories you tell and the range of your audience.

Create one long-form piece of content. That could be a blog or a video. Your long-form content should be what you are going to put on your website. Your website content should be your main priority because that is your real estate and you should be focusing on attracting audiences to your site so you can convert them into customers.

You then take that long form of content and transform it into smaller pieces of content for the different styles of content required for the different platforms. When you do that you will always have content, also, you will be building up your brand identity as well as your brand platform, which is your website.

So have long-form content on your website and create shorter form content for social media. You will have a better Content Marketing Strategy for business development operating in this way. Furthermore, you’ll be keeping your message streamlined. I see so many brands sharing stories that don’t reinforce the overall brand story. They share unrelated stories, and water their message down.