Social media has emerged as a powerful tool for building and nurturing a company’s brand identity. With so many platforms available, though, it’s crucial for businesses to strategically choose where to invest their time and effort.
Understanding where and what to post is vital for carving out a distinct brand identity in the ever-evolving, always-noisy landscape of social media. Here, 15 Forbes Communications Council members explore key things to consider in determining which social media platforms to focus on and the types of content that resonate most effectively with those audiences.
1. LinkedIn For Insights And News
As a B2B marketing solutions provider, our main platform is LinkedIn. Our content is primarily around industry insights, research and company news or events that are meaningful to our clients and prospects. Secondarily, our content centers around celebrating our people, giving shout-outs and sharing company event photos and achievements. That celebratory content always gets the highest engagement! – Dee Blohm, Anteriad
2. Instagram For Visual Storytelling
Instagram is our most-used platform, as it gives us a great opportunity to leverage strong visuals to tell stories and share news. Since Instagram posts require graphics and copy, it’s the perfect platform for us to create content that can be repurposed across other platforms, including LinkedIn, Facebook, email marketing and company slide decks, when appropriate. – Victoria Zelefsky, The Menkiti Group
3. LinkedIn For Internal And External Messaging
I love LinkedIn to get messages across to our business partners, our employees and the media. With LinkedIn, you have a platform where you can go beyond an ad, image or video and share the strategy behind a decision. For consumer media, we tend to choose Instagram over any other platform right now because it successfully spans the ages of our target demographic. – Jeanniey Walden, Liftoff Enterprises
4. TikTok For Traction
I prefer to talk about what works and what doesn’t. Fortunately, I can say that we have more than 100,000 followers on Linkedin due to a lot of effort. We have much room for improvement on TikTok. I know this is not the natural channel for our ideal customer profile, but this channel has the biggest traction we have seen in years. There is an opportunity we might not be seeing. – Santiago Vicaria, Ontop
5. Instagram For Active Engagement
Our target audience hangs out most often on Instagram, so that’s a big focus for our content and campaigns. It’s important to note where your audience is engaged and active, then show up on that platform more frequently so that the content you create for your product or service is seen by the people who would benefit from it most. – Melissa Kandel, little word studio
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6. LinkedIn To Reach The Workforce
We try to engage with our audiences across all major social platforms, but we know LinkedIn is an important space for reaching the workforce and those looking for professional development. We frequently share insights on the benefits of hands-on learning and how to get deeper engagement in your role, particularly in this Fourth Industrial Revolution, as the future of work continues to change. – Sarah Danzl, Skillable
7. X (Formerly Twitter) For Industry And Service Updates
We use diverse strategies and adjust our platform content to the target audience’s interest. We use X for industry and service updates, and LinkedIn to showcase our team and internal processes. Today, every social media platform has its trends and culture. As a result, the content (the form and essence of what you are doing) should be adjusted to what peers would appreciate seeing there. – Iryna Manukovska, XME.digital
8. LinkedIn For Thought Leadership
LinkedIn has become the leading platform for thought leadership. From a strategy perspective, you start with LinkedIn to share an executive’s fresh take, then repurpose it across other platforms based on the audience. The networking benefits of the platform are really secondary now that LinkedIn’s Top Voices program has been established. Its value when sharing content from subject matter experts is profound. – Catherine Anderson, Cityblock
9. Reddit For Tech Content
Reddit is an unusual one, to say the least, especially since LinkedIn is a primary B2B driver. But the reason Reddit is critical to our success is that no social platform is more tech- and software developer-driven than Reddit. That should always be the priority when choosing a social platform: Find the one where your true target customer resides and spends the majority of their time. – Patrick Ward, Formula.Monks
10. LinkedIn For Personal Branding
I post on LinkedIn most frequently. Part of a company’s brand is the personal brand of each of its employees. I post on topics that I’m passionate about and/or have deep expertise in. These include informational pieces based on my own research and experience or my observations and learnings. When relevant, I try to share a personal story to make the content more engaging. – Rekha Thomas, Path Forward Marketing LLC
11. All Major Platforms To Reach Every Audience Member
We consistently post across all major platforms. Each platform has a slightly different audience, which requires us to create content that’s tailored to each. What’s important is making sure you get a return on investment from each channel, so it’s key to have a tech stack that allows for this type of cross-channel posting as well as conduct analyses of what content is working best. – Jamie Gilpin, Sprout Social, Inc.
12. LinkedIn For Building Market Credibility
As a consulting firm, we use LinkedIn a lot more than any other channel. We also leverage LinkedIn for our clients, especially for building market credibility for founders. It’s the right platform for them to be sharing their expertise on so that they are heard and seen by one of their primary target audiences—investors. The content is primarily thought leadership, not salesy. – Parna Sarkar-Basu, Brand and Buzz Marketing, LLC.
13. LinkedIn And X (Twitter) For Data-Based Content
Since we specialize in digital data and measuring the online world, we produce mainly data-based content: infographics, statistics, insights and analyses. We always keep it fun! Some recent examples: Web traffic and trends around the Women’s World Cup, the search volume perspective on Barbie versus Oppenheimer and ongoing coverage of the decline in ChatGPT traffic. – Yael Klass, Similarweb Ltd.
14. Facebook To Maintain Business Relationships
In the affiliate marketing industry, a lot of people use Facebook to maintain business relationships (right along with LinkedIn). We make more use of Facebook than a typical B2B software as a service company might. We take advantage of the more personal nature of Facebook and post a lot of video content focused on our team and our partners. We also share industry articles on topics that are useful to our clients. – Tom Wozniak, OPTIZMO Technologies, LLC
15. LinkedIn For Paid Ad Leads And Organic Reach
Choosing the right social media platform should depend on your target audience. In our case, most of our content is published on LinkedIn because the majority of our clients are B2B companies or government entities. We are satisfied with the ROI regarding paid advertising leads, although we also achieve great results in organic reach. This business network should be everyone’s place to B(2B). – Dora Hrkac, Esyasoft Technologies