There’s a fairly common assumption in marketing that every business needs to be on social media. Not just some of it, but ALL of it. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and presumably whatever new platform launched while you were reading that sentence.
But before you start worrying about content plans, hashtags, video formats and whether your managing director is willing to dance on camera, there’s a much more important question to ask:
Should your business actually be on this platform at all?
Start with your audience, not the platform. The best social media platform for your business isn’t necessarily the newest, biggest or most talked-about. It’s the one your audience actually uses. It sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to skip this bit.
Think about who you’re trying to reach. How old are they? Are you trying to reach individuals or other businesses? Where do they already spend time online? And what are they actually doing when they’re there?
A bakery selling spectacular wedding cakes might be an obvious fit for Instagram or Pinterest. A manufacturer of specialist engineering couplings? Possibly less so. No offence to engineering couplings, of course!
A B2B consultancy may find that LinkedIn makes far more sense than TikTok. A community organisation could get more value from Facebook. You get the idea. Look, we aren’t saying that Dave from Accounts getting 200,000 views on TikTok whilst doing the latest Sabrina Carpenter dance routine wasn’t great for visibility, but will it make Sheila from Denver become a customer of yours? Probably not.
Being everywhere isn’t a strategy. Being in the right places is.
Think about how your brand communicates. Different platforms suit different kinds of content and engage with audiences differently.
Some are highly visual. Some are better suited to professional insight and conversation. Others lend themselves to longer-form video, community discussion or quick, entertaining content.
So ask yourself what you naturally have to share.
Do you have great photography? Interesting projects? Useful expertise? Strong opinions? Behind-the-scenes content? People who are confident appearing on video? Customer stories?
You don’t need all of those things. But there should be a reasonably natural connection between your business and the type of content people expect to find on the platform. That said, it can be that being the ‘only’ square peg in a round hole, can get you brilliant engagement. There is an incredible accountant I follow on Instagram, perhaps not the most obvious place to be learning about business accountancy. Yet, she isn’t talking to FD’s from blue chip companies, she is talking to small business owners who know that there are gaps (often big ones!) in their financial knowledge. So she shares information and expertise in a really non-intimidating way, chatting to camera, whilst sitting in her car. It works. The intimacy of her being in her car, gives an immediate feeling of trust. She has made producing the content feel as simple as pressing record and post. No creative direction, because the interest is in what she is saying, not how the video looks. Whilst this doesn’t feel very ‘Instagrammy’ she knew that that is where her audience were and she worked out the best way to connect with them using authenticity. Even this type of content production takes time and thought though, don’t be fooled into thinking it doesn’t take up much of her time prior to hitting record!
So, if every post requires a minor creative crisis and three people saying, “But what would we actually put on there?”, that may be telling you something about whether this is right for you.
Can you realistically keep it going?
This is the less glamorous bit. Opening a social media account is easy. Maintaining a useful one takes time. You have to feed the beast. It is called ‘social’ for a reason. Before committing to a platform at all, think about who will actually create the content, take the photographs, write the posts, make the videos, reply to the comments and keep things moving.
If the answer is currently, “Sarah in HR said she might have a go”, you may need a slightly more robust plan as, to do it well, it will take up an awful lot of her time. And an abandoned account can sometimes look worse than no account at all.
It’s often much better to choose one, possibly two channels you can manage properly (and use the same content on) than to have six profiles quietly gathering dust. Or, perhaps, see if outsourcing to professionals would be worth your investment.
A quick relevance check
Before adding another social media icon to your website footer, ask yourself:
- Is a meaningful proportion of our audience actually using this platform? If not, can you create content that would connect to them?
- Does the style of content suit our brand and what we have to say?
- Can it support a genuine business objective e.g. awareness, recruitment, community, enquiries or sales?
- Do we have enough, or could we create enough, content to sustain it beyond the first enthusiastic fortnight?
- Does somebody genuinely have the time, inclination and expertise to manage it?
If the answer is mostly no, that’s useful information. You haven’t failed at social media. You’ve just avoided creating another job nobody needed and perhaps more traditional marketing methods would be more appropriate.
If a platform does make sense, where do you start?
Start small.
Decide what you actually want the channel to achieve, then choose two or three themes you can talk about consistently. That might be your work, your expertise and your people. Or products, customer stories and behind-the-scenes content. Then give yourself a head start by building up a content plan and a small bank of content before you begin. Trying to invent a post from scratch every Tuesday afternoon is an excellent way to start resenting the whole thing.
Small also means small in production! If you think you are going to produce a genuinely insightful client interview that starts with a drone shot of you walking into your office (or preferably the prettier office next door), then I am here to tell you that that is very unlikely to happen. Unless it is someone’s full time job. Trust me!
And finally, decide what success looks like.
Follower numbers are easy to see, but they’re not always the most useful measure. Depending on your goals, engagement from the right audience or simply greater familiarity with your brand might matter far more.
Because ultimately, the question isn’t whether your brand can be on a particular social platform. It definitely can. They are open to all (for better or worse!)
The better question is whether it’s truly worth being there.
P.S. I urge you to learn from our mistakes and do as we say not as we do!
