How to Identify the Best Social Network for You

 

One size fits all. Unfortunate as it is, the above rule doesn’t apply to the world of social networks. A social network that may sound perfect for business may indeed be a recipe for disaster for another business. Your competitors are all over the place so should you copy them and try to be omnipresent on all social networks? Would it help if you were present on all social networks?

How do you decide which social networks is right for you and your business? Here are some exclusive tips on the considerations before you take the plunge on any social network.



Your Business Needs
The most important criterion to select a social network is to evaluate it against your business’ current and future needs. For example, if you want to have a social presence mainly to connect with partners, resellers and want to develop purely professional relationships, LinkedIn is perhaps the best place to start. On the contrary, if you want to reach out to customers and deal in the B2C segment, Twitter and Facebook are right for you.
Further, if you want to frequently do product demos, How-Tos etc, it’s a good idea to setup a dedicate YouTube channel for your business.

Learning Curve
Despite the explosive growth of Internet, not everybody is technology-savvy. I recommend Twitter as the start platform for businesses that are wary of the learning curve. Once you get the hang of things, extending your presence to Facebook and other social networks would seem like a logical extension.

Privacy
Facebook may be the world’s leading social network with nearly 600 million users but its privacy measures still leave a lot to be desired. If you are wary of privacy and would rather keep it short and simple, Twitter might be the perfect social network for your needs.

Content
If you frequently need to push out content updates to your customers, I’d recommend maintaining an active blog and then syncing it up with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. There are many multi-faceted tools such as ping.fm which allow you to sync multiple social networks together so you need not put in manual efforts to update your presence on these individually.

Customization
I’ve come across a number of businesses which believe customization and white labeling their presence on social networks is a huge challenge. They want their Facebook pages and Twitter profile to look exactly similar to their website in order to maintain a consistent look and feel. In that sense, Facebook is perhaps’ your best bet as it offers a lot of flexibility in designing your business pages.


The more, the merrier?
It’s more about quality than quantity when it comes to using social networks for your business. However, I do not mean that you should restrict yourself to a solitary social network. It’s important to have a social media strategy in place which will allow to you leverage the best of each social network.
My advice is – start with a single social network that seems best-suited for your needs and then expand your presence to other networks in due course of time.
Which social network is right for you? How do you determine which social network is best-suited for your needs? Please share your success story with us by leaving a comment below this post.