Finding the Right Social Platforms

If we were to start a new business, it would probably be a business that, through some magic formula, would tell marketers which social platforms their specific customers are spending most of their time on in a given month, with guidance on how to reach them. It would probably make a fortune for the simple reason that it’s hard to find these customers beyond the major social platforms.

It’s easy to learn the paid and unpaid marketing solutions on the second rung social platforms (those listed in Table 13-1). What about the rest? How do you, as a marketer beginning to apply social media marketing, know where your customers are spending their time? Making your job even harder is the fact that you can’t just focus on the social networks: You need to look more broadly at the video websites, the mainstream media websites, the blogger networks, and social media publishing tools that are all beginning to incorporate social functionality.

To help you identify the social platforms, we’re going to share a four-step process for identifying the right social platforms on which to find your customers. But before we do that, we’d like to classify the social platforms into a more meaningful segmentation.

Classifying the social platforms

As of this writing, there are four major social platforms:

check.png Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

YouTube

We classify them as the four ...

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