How to Tailor Your Social Media Strategy & Content For Each Platform

Social media — we all love to hate it. But in all reality, it’s one of the most convenient, not to mention (mostly) free ways to distribute content, reach new people, and engage potential clients or customers.

While Google boasts in being responsible for over 50% of total visits to websites, according to a recent study, social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter combined were not far behind, driving 30%.

This means there is a huge opportunity to increase your website traffic and ultimately your conversions through social media if you do it the right way!

Each social channel has unique tools and reaches a different demographic, so each should have a different strategy. For the best ROI, you’ll want to ensure you’re using the platforms where your target audience is hanging out and that while you’re there, you’re using that platform to its fullest potential.

With what seems like a constantly changing digital landscape, creating unique, targeted posts for each social platform may seem like a challenge, but trust us, it’s well-worth it. So we’re here to guide you through the process of creating a successful social media strategy tailored to each specific platform.

Facebook

Facebook has recently made it a bit more tricky for businesses to be seen without paid promotion, which is pretty frustrating to say the least, but growing your business on Facebook isn’t impossible.

You can definitely choose to boost posts and do paid advertising, but there are also a few free ways to get your business out there on Facebook!

We highly recommend joining local Facebook groups for networking purposes. This is one of the most important strategies on Facebook to increase visibility and referrals without paid advertising.

Getting website traffic from Facebook through sharing useful blogs and articles is another strategy we highly recommend. When sharing articles from your site, some additional tips for creating captivating and engaging Facebook posts include:

1. Create a click-worthy title
2. Add an eye-catching quote from your content
3. Use a list to break out some of your key points

Instagram

Instagram is obviously a more visual platform, and from main grid video & photo posts, Stories, Reels, and IGTV, you have a lot of options.

A new rising trend on Instagram is to utilize longer captions as a micro-blog post in order to share valuable content with followers.

Here are a few different ways you can make the most of Instagram:

1. Behind-the-Scenes: Is your team working on a fun project? Doing a team-building exercise? Watering your office plants? These are all fun things to share in short BTS videos.
2. Educational Tips & Tricks: With attention spans shorter than ever, if you want to keep your audience engaged, you should definitely be adding value to their lives. Give them a bit (but not too much ????) of your extensive knowledge of your industry. Get your audience wanting more! We’ve actually found the more you share, the more some people value your expertise enough to contact you and become a client.
3. User-Generated Content: You can encourage your audience to post about you on their own pages (AKA: User Generated Content) by sharing tagged posts on your own feed. Some studies show that user-generated content can grow an Instagram account by over 500 percent in a year.

LinkedIn

First let’s talk demographics: LinkedIn’s users are slightly more likely to be men than women, and most of their active users are over the age of 30. LinkedIn is a great place to share job openings, company news, and professional content. It’s also a great place to network!

Pro tip: If you want to drive engagement on LinkedIn, attach an image, a video, or a link to your website. In fact, according to LinkedIn, “images generally result in a 98% higher comment rate” and “links and videos that automatically play in the feed usually result in a 75% higher share rate.”

Final Thoughts

We know this list is by no means exhaustive, but we wanted to provide you with some nuggets of advice as you curate different strategies for the different social media platforms you use to grow your business.

And as you may have noticed, we didn’t mention Twitter, Pinterest, or TikTok. We know every small business is different, but right now, we currently do not recommend for small businesses who are trying to reach local audiences to spend too much time on those platforms, unless it is for a very specific reason.

Speaking of, we’re happy to chat more about that if you’d like to set up a free 20 minute social media strategy session.