Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Choosing Social Media Platforms

The first step is to recognize that no single social platform is going to be enough for your SMM activities. It’s extremely unlikely that your potential customers use only one of the social platforms exclusively. In fact, research shows that a user is rarely only on one platform. It is far more likely that your customers have profiles on two or three social platforms and use some of them more than others.

You’ve probably also noticed that marketing on several social platforms isn’t that much more expensive than marketing on one, as long as most of your energies are focused on a few. It makes sense to choose several platforms versus just one to do your marketing.

Still, that doesn’t answer the question of where to market. You can’t be marketing on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, YouTube, hi5, Bebo, orkut, Flickr, Twitter, and Classmates all at once with the same amount of effort. Although SMM is considered cheap, it still takes time, money, and effort when you’re doing so on many social platforms at once. (You’re probably going to confuse customers who have presences on several of the social platforms to boot.)

The answer is to put a lot of effort into marketing on a few social platforms where your customers participate the most and to have lighter presences on the other platforms.

To pick the right platforms, you can start by looking at the audiences with which you interact. For purposes of this discussion, they can be broken down into the ...