There are so many social networks out there, how do you know which social media to use for your business?
Don’t worry: you don’t need to be active on all social media. Instead, your social media strategy should focus on being active on just a couple of platforms, depending on your business and the audience you’re trying to reach.
Here’s Part 2 of our quick guide to the major creative social media options out there, focusing on Instagram and Pinterest:
Instagram is a mobile photography app owned by Facebook. While Twitter is a feed of sentences, Instagram is a feed of often square-shaped images, meant to be shared in real time. It is the fastest-growing social networking, currently logging over 400 million users: 90% of which are under age 35 and 68% of which are women.
Instagram is best used with the *quality over quantity* mantra in mind: it’s better to post 1-3 excellent images per day rather than 5-10 mediocre ones. To expand your reach, you can tag relevant brands in the image and use hashtags that your target audience is searching. Unlike other social media platforms, you can’t share website links in your posts – so if click-through is you primary objective, Instagram is likely not the platform you want to be utilizing for your business.
When it comes to using Instagram for your business, consider that this platform is better suited to certain types of people and brands. Businesses in the apparel, entertainment, and media industries tend to do well generating engagement and promoting brand awareness on it.
If your business brand is highly visual, involves shopping, and targets young women, Instagram may be an effective tool for marketing your business.
Pinterest’s main demographic is similar to Instagram’s in that most of its 100 million users are young women. However, it differs in that most Pinterest users are middle-to-upper class folks looking for shopping inspiration.
The idea behind Pinterest is to organize and share images you find online by pinning them onto themed boards that you’ve created and curated. Most images automatically link through to the site they were pinned from, resulting in increased traffic to the website that generated the pin. If your business website has a solid array of visual imagery, ideally product photography, it’s worth taking the time to establish a Pinterest presence and make your product images easily pinnable.
The most frequently-pinned items fall into the food and drink, DIY and crafts, and home decor categories. Consequently, Pinterest tends to work well for retailers and lifestyle brands.
If your business is a purveyor of visually appealing items, you should consider creating a Pinterest for business account.