I believe that it’s important to ask the following questions before selecting a social media platform to support your client’s online marketing strategy:
- Do you know if your client’s target demographic uses that social media platform? Do they predominantly use that platform via their desktop or their mobile device?
- Do you know how the social media platform algorithm works? How difficult will it be for your client to create the type of content that the platform requires in the frequency required to ensure that the content is noticed?
- How intensive will the social media monitoring be on that platform? Can you client handle that type of social media monitoring and response?
- Does the social media platform support your search marketing efforts either by building social media links or increasing search engine spider exposure and indexing?
- Do you or the client have the resources to stay on top of the changing features and algorithms on all of the social media platforms you’ve selected?
- Have you determined how you will measure your social media success, and have you set up the tracking to measure those goals?
Those are just a sampling of the type of questions that I think are essential to ask when developing a social media campaign. While social media can be used as a platform to create behavior change in your target audience, those goals are not possible if you haven’t tackled the essentials of developing a campaign that will effectively meet your target audience when they are receptive to your marketing messaging.