How to Pick the Best Social Media Platform for Your Lac du Bonnet Business

There is no doubt that social media has become essential in building brand awareness, generating leads, connecting with your clients and potential clients, and ultimately selling your products and services. So, how can Lac du Bonnet businesses put social media to work for them? We’re here to help you figure that out! Let’s dive into the world of social media to pick the best social media platform for your Lac du Bonnet business by setting goals and comparing platforms.

First, let’s talk briefly about why your business should use Social Media as part of your marketing mix.

Social media supports your website, integrates with Search Engine Optimization, provides targeted advertising opportunities, expands your reach, builds a community around your company, and helps you connect with your local audience. Social media is a part of your brand story, and it has an impact on how you are perceived.

That’s a fairly big list of compelling reasons to implement a social media strategy for your business. But before you jump online and start posting, let’s look at what social media channels will significantly impact your business.

We can determine this by answering a few questions.

Before we get into specifics on each of the popular platforms you can consider using, here are some questions you should ask yourself.

Who is your target audience? You can answer this question by creating a customer persona, which is a biography about your ideal customer. Include information such as age, gender, family status, interests, hobbies, motivations, and buying habits.

Where is your target audience? Ask yourself what social media platforms your customers are using because, ultimately, that is where you will want to be whether you like that platform or not.

What story do you want to tell about your business and your products or services? To answer this question, think about who you are, what you do, and why you do it. Include information on what makes your company unique and how you will define your brand’s personality.

What kind of content do you plan to produce for your social media channel(s) consistently? Do you take a lot of pictures? Do you like shooting videos? Are you more comfortable with text and blog writing? The type of content you will be producing plays a key role in which channel you will use to communicate with your customers. If the idea of making videos scares you, YouTube is not the place to be. Do some research and see what others in your industry are doing on their social channels. Examine the creative assets they are using (photos, videos, infographics, etc.) and look at the user engagement to see which assets are getting results and which aren’t.

Last but not least, ask yourself how social media will support your website. In our Article ‘Yes, Your Business Needs a Website,’ we discuss how social media is not a replacement tool for having a business website. One of the great things about adding social media to the mix is that you can add timely conversations to your marketing mix. Social Media Platforms are great at sending people to your website for more information. You can also integrate paid advertising to work with your website, capturing information that will help you make sales.

Now it’s time to take a look at your options and decide which will have the biggest impact on your bottom line. It is important to note that you don’t have to be on every Social Media Platform available. Pick one or two that will be easy to maintain and provide you with the best return on investment.

Lac du Bonnet Businesses and non-profit organizations can achieve great results using Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn to reach local consumers. These are widely used Platforms all over the globe, but more specifically, they have a great base of Lac du Bonnet users – which is really what you want if your target customer lives here or frequently visits our community.

Platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit, and Pinterest are harder to benefit from if your target market is the local Lac du Bonnet Market. While these platforms are hugely popular, they don’t have a large percentage of the Lac du Bonnet population using them, reducing their usefulness because you won’t be able to grow your following.

Here is a quick comparison chart of the most commonly used Social Media Platforms. We’ve outlined the core information that, along with your answers to the questions above, will help you choose your platform.

Social media isn’t a magic wand. It takes work and planning. So if you’ve tried social media, ask yourself if you really tried it or if you just set up a page, posted a few times and then gave up because the results didn’t come fast enough. Building social media takes time, and if you keep at it, you will see a payout in the end. Here are some common questions we have been asked while working with Lac du Bonnet businesses about implementing a social media strategy.

I’ve been using social media for years, and it hasn’t done anything for me; why?

The first thing we do is look at the platforms, most often finding dead channels. Posts are sporadic, with months between them, making the business page irrelevant, even to those who follow you. Whatever platform you pick as your dominant social media platform, share regularly. The comparison chart above outlines the basic daily/weekly post standards for the platforms. One of the reasons you may not be seeing results is that you are not posting nearly enough.

Another reason you do not see results could be that you are not sharing relevant content that connects with your audience. For most platforms and businesses, only 25% of your posts should directly promote your business. The remaining 75% should be about your audience, providing and becoming a source of information relevant to your industry or even entertainment by sharing videos and memes, for example.

How many followers do I really need?

I recently had a conversation with a Lac du Bonnet business owner in the service sector, who has been organically (not paying for advertising or boosting posts) growing their Facebook page for years. The business owner felt something was missing because they didn’t have thousands of followers like others in the industry. They use a website to provide information and Facebook to promote their services.

This business owner had 421 followers. That’s approximately 10% of the Lac du Bonnet population. This business’ target market has been well-defined and includes about 22% of Lac du Bonnet’s population. Their local target market potential is 844 people, and nearly half of them are connected to this business on Facebook – I’d call that a win! More than that, this business has a strong engagement rate that other companies would be envious of, with 80% of its followers actively engaging with the content put out. The business owner has a full schedule and a waiting list of clients.

The moral of the story is it is not the number of followers you have; it is the quality of your followers. If this business owner had thousands of followers, like their counterparts in Winnipeg, they would have thousands of unqualified contacts on their platform that wouldn’t become part of their sales funnel.

This is very dependent on what platforms you are using. Lac du Bonnet business owners often choose Facebook and Instagram, with YouTube as a tool to upload videos that are then shared on Facebook and embedded onto websites.

Would You Like Some Help with Social Media?

The Lac du Bonnet CDC is committed to the Lac du Bonnet business community and we want to help you in any way we can. Our team has extensive knowledge about social media platforms and is available to help you get started, or implement new strategies on your current platforms. One-on-one training and planning sessions can be booked with our Economic Development Officer. This service is free to Lac du Bonnet business owners as part of our commitment to you.

Let’s Get Your Lac du Bonnet business using Social Media to Grow

If you would like social media support and training, please call Cyndie at 1-204213-0033 or fill in the contact form below.