By Madeline Roberts
Online Career Tips Contributor
Social media marketing is no longer a trend but rather an essential business practice. Whether you’re on Main Street or Wall Street, your company can benefit from having a social presence. Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram can help you learn about your audience, increase website traffic, generate leads, provide customer service, and improve brand awareness at little to no cost.
If your company is just starting out on these platforms, or even if it’s been active for a few years, it’s a worthwhile exercise to reassess your target customers and where they spend their time online.
Use Facebook to Reach Your Customers
Facebook launched in 2004 as a way for college students to connect, but today it has grown to more than one billion monthly active users and the average user age has changed considerably. Users between ages 35 and 54 account for more than 31% of the total user base and the next largest age bracket is 25-34 with 44 million users.
Facebook will be useful for sharing company news, creating events, or posting customer testimonials. Some organizations even use it to host data collection forms through third party tools.
Show Your Professional Side on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is ideal for showcasing your company’s products and services, listing job openings, sharing press releases, and highlighting corporate culture. All of this can be done on a Company Page, which will in turn connect you with your target audience. In examining the 347 million LinkedIn users, the majority are between ages 30 and 49 but don’t forget about the younger users who may be looking for their first job out of college.
You can also use LinkedIn Groups as a way for customers to connect with each other and share information.
Conversations and Breaking News on Twitter
Twitter is the perfect network for having conversations with your customers, providing fast customer service, and sharing breaking news. Compared to Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter users skew a bit younger; 35% of the 300 million monthly users are between ages 18-29.
As Search Engine People explain, 67% of users are more likely to buy from brands they follow on Twitter. This means that your company’s account should help to position itself as an industry leader and add value to its followers.
Get Visual on Instagram
Visual content continues to be a marketing trend in 2015, which makes Instagram a useful tool for businesses. The majority of the 200 million users are between ages 18 and 29 and this generation prefers easily digestible content.
Share pictures of your products or take followers behind the scenes with a 15-second video. What you share should tell a story with or without the use of a caption.
This information can help your social media team determine which platform requires more attention. If your target customer is a teenager, for example, you will likely want to put more energy into Instagram but that doesn’t mean you should ignore Facebook. Take these details back to your business managers and work through a detailed plan of how to best use each network.
[Source for Age Demographics: Jetscram Blog]
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