Chris Broadbent
Content Types
Tweets allow users to post 280 characters of text alongside an optional photo, video, gif, poll or location.
Pros
- Fun fact – there are more daily Twitter users globally than there are on Instagram!
- A great platform to share humour and have some fun
- Reach is fantastic (if you put in the research time)
Cons
- Hard to drive traffic back to websites as the URLS take a vast amount of the character counts
- Engagement can be tricky to measure
- A lot of competition and lack of understanding on how to use the service
Content Types
Pinterest is primarily an image-based platform, but its use for video and text is not to be overlooked. Each upload can and should be accompanied by text describing both it and the site it links to. If you can contextualise the visuals, this can lead to a stringer click-through rate.
Pros
- Visual, inspiring platform
- Well written posts gain a high reach
- More engaged users, who could be further down the buying funnel and more likely to follow a link to a website
Cons
- Limited on the kind of content that can be posted
- Managing the platform can be a lot of work
There is no quick answer to this question. Managing multiple social media channels is no mean feat and often requires a large amount of time before you see any return from your efforts. So, it makes sense to start using the best channels for the kind of content you will be producing for social media.
Try not to make choices based on assumptions about your audience.
You may be a B2B business, targeting warehouse managers, LinkedIn would be a good channel to start with. Assuming warehouse managers don’t use channels like Facebook however could be a mistake. The chances are that – much like everyone else – warehouse managers use a number of social media channels. The success of your potential LinkedIn strategy could be dependant on how much time you have to spend creating engaging, thought-provoking, industry-current content. If you have the time to manage this, then it would make sense to compliment your strategy with a platform that you could use versions of your existing content on – like Twitter/Facebook. Unless your business is able to create regular video or visual content, it may not be worth initially investing your time in Youtube or Instagram.
Preparation is vital when it comes to choosing platforms. You need to understand your audience, their behaviours, the content you can commit to regularly producing and how each platform could work for you and your business. Ideally, you will get to a point where you can trial each available social media channel and work out the best ROAS on your time from there.
Content Types
Instagram is a relatively simple platform (in theory), allowing an image or video alongside a caption. You can also post ethereal content to Instagram stories in the form of imagery, video or text alongside a number of interactive features like gifs, polls, questions, stickers, interactive music and more!
Pros
- An inspiring platform, with incredible reach
- Shoppable product posts
- Plenty of conversations to join in on
- A real community vibe can be great to communicate good company ethos
Cons
- You need to invest in great visuals to be in with a chance of standing out
- Tons of research required to reach a genuine audience
LinkedIn Business Page
Content Types
A very versatile tool for businesses! Video, photo, text, documents, pdf documents, presentations. Written content does well on LinkedIn as the audience tend to be looking to learn or research.
Pros
- Great educational platform
- Perfect for businesses who want to go into more detail about their products/services
- Good for B2B
Cons
- Keep it professional
- Hard to build a large following on an unestablished/new business page
Youtube
Content Types
Video. Youtube is the number 1 video platform on the web, and as a word has become synonymous with the media type. The strength of this platform from a marketing and engagement perspective comes from its ability to be embedded in other websites, emails or shared across almost all social platforms via direct sharing or the embedding of a link. Building a strong repeat engagement on this platform can lead to increases in brand awareness as well as an uptake in click-through traffic. Although percentages on this platform will often be lower, it is typically a small percentage of a very large pool of potential customers.
Pros
- Massive global audience – almost 5 billion videos are watched per day
- Opportunity for ROI from advertising
- You can optimise videos for the best exposure
Cons
- Incredibly competitive
- Slow growth
- High resource spend, both time and money producing content