Which Social Media platform should you choose?

In today’s world, social media has become an extremely necessary tool to grow for anyone who needs an audience. Social media has created business opportunities and provided a source of income for several freelancers. Influencers on social media are now using their following to advertise brands and businesses.

Instagram influencers, Twitter celebrities, Facebook pages with a huge following are all sought after by big companies.

But one question that comes up again and again among budding creators is how to grow their social media following, and which is the right platform for them. All social media channels offer different advantages for different types of creators.

Using all social media platforms at the same time can lead to social media fatigue very soon.

Image source — https://diamedia.net/2015/03/09/social-media-fatigue/

While there are several articles that explain how to grow your social media presence, in this article, I highlight some key aspects that one should consider while getting started building their brand on a social media platform.

While comparing different social media platforms, I take into consideration three main factors: Discovery, Reach and Effort. I’ll define Discovery as the ability to find your target audience. Reach can be defined as how much of your target audience you can get to. I’ll say the effort is the amount of time and money investment required to reach your target audience.

I think the most important thing for a creator in early phases is testing your creation with a target audience. Once you see something is hit with a very specific audience, you need to think about how you can grow your reach to other people. Hence, thinking about your target audience, which social media platform they are on and reaching out to them is important. You should spend time on finding your target audience in the early phases of your career as a creator.

Let’s break down these factors for different social media networks –

Facebook:

With 2.32 bn monthly active users, Facebook is undoubtedly the largest social media platform in the world. It is likely that you have a Facebook account already. If you do, starting to build your brand on Facebook would be easy with your friends and family already connected to you.

If you don’t have a Facebook account, it still can be assumed that a lot of your friends are on Facebook, so connecting with them on Facebook would be as easy as sending a Friend Request.

For building your brand, it is important that you start by creating a Facebook Page. A Facebook Page is like your website but restricted to Facebook. Think of it as a way to showcase what you do to your target audience.

There are several online resources that can help you set up excellent Facebook pages. To start, you can take a look at differences between pages and profiles, as stated by Facebook here.

Let’s look at how Facebook performs on our comparison metrics:

1. Discovery: In terms of discovering your target audience, the Facebook search bar is your first friend. Putting in keywords revolving around your content will help you discover groups that are similar to what you are already doing. By joining similar Facebook groups or following pages, you can understand what people are doing in these communities. However, groups can be restricted, and not all groups will be spam-free. So, getting access to the groups’ content might have roadblocks, thus taking a lot of time to access and research.

2. Reach: With Facebook, once you set up your Facebook Page and make it public, you can invite all your friends to like and follow the page. Depending on how many friends you have on Facebook, you can target your reach. If you have 500 friends, you can get 500 followers with a few simple clicks. If you have a wider network, you can get more followers through this network. At the same time, since 30% of the world is already using Facebook, with a single Facebook page, your page is available to this audience.

3. Effort: To build an initial following on Facebook is easy, but to maintain the growth seems to be the hard part. Getting the first 100 followers for your Facebook page can be easily done by sending requests to all your friends. However, once you get to this point, it becomes really hard to grow, because you don’t know how to reach out to a larger audience. The only way to grow your audience would be to promote your page in related groups, personally asking people to share your page with others and grow over time. This is a painful growth process, which will take at least a couple of years to build a good number of followers.

Instagram:

With a billion monthly active users, Instagram is probably the next biggest social network platform you want to look at. Considering its appeal among the younger audiences and its features geared towards creators, it is worth trying out and seeing if it helps you engage with your audience.

Let’s take a look at Instagram based on our three parameters:

1. Discovery: With pictures and videos as the core piece of engagement, Instagram attracts the younger audiences (ages 15–30). With a bigger focus on hashtags, once you start populating your Instagram account with photos, suggestions for similar photos and profiles become more relevant to your profile. It is very easy to find people who have the same interests as you. As a result, building a good Instagram profile can be valuable if you want to attract younger audiences. Hashtags will take you a long way in discovering like-minded people on Instagram.

2. Reach: With features that attract the younger audiences, if your target audience is under 35, you should think of Instagram seriously. It is very easy for you to discover others, similarly, others can discover you with equal ease. As long as you keep posting photos consistently, you will grow over time. Reaching out to new people would seem like an organic process. Yet, one of the problems Instagram faces is the huge number of bots that follow profiles just to increase follower count. Be wary of using bots yourself, as they could be good in the short run but affect you in the longer run.

3. Effort: This depends on the type of person you are. If you are a person who has a lot of pictures that you can share, Instagram is the easiest tool to do that to build a following. One photo a day is an excellent benchmark to start with. Clicking a picture, applying filters and putting enough hashtags in the comments would take