Question from Hustleburg’s Episode 4, Answering Listener Questions: What is the single most important social platform to get your content out as a side hustler and beyond? Or does it vary from business to business?
I’m glad you hedged your question, because I look at this two ways.
Single Most Important Social Media Platform
The single most important platform is where everyone already is. Right now, in 2020, that’s Facebook. At the end of 2019, they reported 2.5 BILLION monthly active users. As such, it’s simply too large to ignore, and people expect that no matter what business you’re in, that you at least have a Facebook page with some basic information.
Your Customers Are Already There
The reason that people expect this is because that’s someplace where they already are and they can find out something about you. Even if you don’t have a website, people expect that you have a business page on Facebook. We aren’t talking about your Facebook profile, we’re talking about a Facebook business page. You don’t want to confuse the two. A profile is where you share the photos of your children with their grandparents, but a page is about your business activity. Separating them keeps your personal life personal and your business life business.
Great Tools to Advertise
Also, Facebook is going to be a great way to jump into advertising as a part of your digital strategy on social media. Facebook offers so much data on their users to advertisers, so that you can hyper-target your demographics and psychographics. This allows you to spend your advertising dollars only going after your ideal customer. Their tool allows you to really focus on specific zip codes, specific age groups, and specific interests. When you really know your customers and your potential customers, they provide an awesome opportunity to utilize. These tools within Facebook further their position as the single most important platform in 2020. Keep in mind that some advice in the digital marketing space doesn’t age well, because of how rapidly things change so I’ll likely revise this in the future.
Also, Consider This…
Current popularity does not always forever popularity, so the above is not to say that it’s going to be the most popular social platform going forward. Remember Myspace? Or Friendster before that? Neither of those stuck around, as they were surpassed by something that was more interesting or more social. We wanted something different, found it, and platforms either evolve with us or go away.
The other way to look at this question is to consider other platforms as well, because marketing is all about telling the stories. Most importantly, it’s about telling YOUR story, and how will you best tell that story. For example, if you do something that’s very visual, has a very compelling visual element, or is very complicated to share with words, you’re definitely going to want an almost exclusively visual platform.
Finally, you also need to make sure that you choose a platform that you’re comfortable with using. That does not mean, however, that you can just not use a platform because you’re not comfortable. You should learn how to use it. You do that by watching what successful users of that platform do, by interacting with them and your potential customers, and by using the greatest information resource in the history of mankind.
This listener question was a part of Hustleburg’s fourth episode. If you have a question you’d like to have answered, please join the community here.
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