In the last lesson, I shared a lot of demographic information from many of the major social media platforms. In this lesson, I plan to discuss other factors that relate to which platform might be the best one for you. These are intended, as general guidelines and you many want to experiment with multiple platforms before finalizing on a strategy. I'm also going to give you some examples of businesses that have done really well on social media by focusing on new and upcoming platforms. So, the first thing is where can your target audience be found? In the prior lesson I talked a little bit about the demographics and where women tend to congregate more or high income people, or people in rural areas and these kinds of things and these are all factors in picking your platform. Know where your target audience is. And if you need to, do some experimentation. You can try a platform out for a while. And if it doesn't work, just sort of de-emphasize it and focus on something else instead and then what platform fits your content strategy? You've got highly visual social media like Instagram and Pinterest. Well, okay. If that's what's easiest for you to produce and most natural for you to create great content just highly visual, then that's where you should go or maybe you're news feed oriented and that fits Twitter. Discussion oriented, that would be Google+ and Facebook. Or maybe specialty networks, like Vine and Snapchat are the best ones for you. So these are all things to think about in deciding what platform might best fit your strategy, but the other thing I want you to think about is early stage land grabs. Way back in the 1800s, the settlers went West, because they had the opportunity to grab parcels of land. And basically, you showed up. You grabbed it, you farmed it. It was yours and it was that simple, and guess what? It can work somewhat similar in the world of social media. For example, there's this guy, Zach King on Vine. He was an early adopter of Vine. And here, I'm showing a picture of one of his Vine videos and you can see that he's got over 3.5 million followers. That's a large audience and that's actually worked out really well for him as it netted him a deal to actually do publications and promotion of other people's stuff through his Vine account, because he has a large audience. People want to get access to 3.5 million people. Steps really to getting an early mover advantage. One is to recognize new channels, as they're developing and then test the waters for the potential. And if it's not working, dump it or you don't have to entirely dump it, you can just de-emphasize it. Stop posting there some action, just spend a little bit less time there. But if it does appeared to be working, then keep engaging and building those followings. Here's the tip that I want you to take away from this. New networks allow you to grow your followings much faster than established ones. We all think we want to rush off to Facebook, because they have 1.4 billion people on it and you know what? That actually is a good reason to be on Facebook. But since everybody's there, it is hard to grow your following quickly. On a new channel, it's a lot easier. And then once you get into that new channel, as I make it my last point or the last point I'm making here is establish leadership in that channel for that segment. So, I'm going to give you another example. Back in May of 2015, Google+ actually restructured their platform and they announced the notion of collection. Actually, a feature kind of similar to what Pinterest does. The idea was that people would map their interests into separate collections within their accounts and then other people could follow just that collection without having to follow the entire person. Again, like I said, similar to Pinterest. Well, back in May, that was a new thing. So now I am going to show you a person here, Eli Fennell who is very active on Google+ and he embraced this notion of collections very quickly and here's an example of one of his collections on technology and he's got over 200,000 followers. So, this has allowed him to build a very strong presence in front of a significant number of people and he did it very quickly. Keep in mind that this happened in May of 2015 and this snapshot is, as of January of 2016. Another example I want to show you is this is from a brand now. A brand called best made and they invested a lot of effort in Instagram. And as you see, here's an example of one of the images they shared there and here's what they did. They didn't spend millions of dollars on this campaign, they just focused on the one platform and they focused also on an outdoor brand theme, very consistent with the products that they make. For example, one of those is an ax, a very sturdy ax that they cell. But what they did is they invested a lot of energy into pictorial essays, really rich very interesting essays. So, here's an example of the start of one. If I remember right, this has something to do with a trip through Scotland and here's the opening picture and you can see the forward and back arrows on the right and left here and you can scroll your way through this essay. There's no text in this entire essay. But the fact of the matter is the way it's put together, the content tells a story and this is perfect for Instagram. And so, here's an example or an illustration of the benefits. What I'm showing you here is a search in Google Trends. If you're not familiar with this tool, you should learn about. But what I've done is in Google Trends, I have entered the phrase Best Made, which is the brand name of this company. And this chart is showing over a period of a number of years, the number of searches that people are doing on the phrase Best Made. And boy, that looks like that trend is up into the right, and that is a wonderful thing. It's says, their visibility has gone up through the roof. And you can see here also, I'll circle it in red that they have over 90,000 followers on Instagram. These two things worked in concert, just like this sharing through Instagram. The creation of these pictorial essays create this situation where their brand gained a lot of additional visibility and it did actually help drive their SEO. In this lesson, I talked about some factors that might influence what social media platforms you might want to include as part of your marketing strategy. I also talked about the benefits of investing in new and upcoming platforms. Remember, the bottom line is to find the platforms that help you the most toward your business goals. As part of this, you should be willing to experiment a bit, potentially even reduce your involvement on a platform if it's not working that well for you. The bottom line is to invest your time where you get the best results. You may recall that in the last module, I talked a bit about building an audience. In the next lesson, I'm going to take that further and give you more visibility in how to do that on social media.
