Find your Perfect Social Network: Part 1

Find your Perfect Social Network Part 1 Relevant at all times of the year, but also hella helpful for your Fringe residency! With so many platforms available to you and your business it is difficult to know exactly what platforms you should cover. Don’t just go mad and join all of them at the same time!  Especially if you’re a one man band.  As we’ve have mentioned in 10 ways to your social consistency is key and you will make your life incredibly difficult for yourself (unless you are a content creation machine!). We’ve broken down the key stats of leading social media platforms for you to make your life a little easier.  

Platform Name	Facebook
Monthly Active Users	2.41 billion
Key Demographic	Basically, everyone and their parents, and often their Grandparents.  Pretty much one third of the entire world uses Facebook so your target audience is bound to be here!
Pros	Everyone is on it!  And every community group you could ever want to find probably already exists somewhere.  It is also diverse in the content you can share including live video, gifs, photos, text etc.
Cons	Due to the high number of users it means you also have a high number of competition so it can be really difficult to build followers organically

Platform Name	YouTube
Monthly Active Users	1.9 Billion
Key Demographic	Again, a lot of people! But the people who use it for the longest each week are aged 16-24, followed by the 25-34 age bracket.  Also, keep in mind that 70% of users turn to YouTube to learn something.
Pros	The Biggest Video platform in the world!  Streaming platforms are slowly taking over from TV and YouTube stars are becoming the new celebrities so if you hit the right market not only will you find your audience but you could even make a living from Vlogging.
Cons	Like Facebook you have a lot of competition so do your research and make sure you’re using it to your advantage.

Platform Name	Whatsapp
Monthly Active Users	1.5 billion
Key Demographic	Like many social platforms it is predominantly your younger audience, but it is slowly taking the place of text messaging and its market is growing.
Pros	It all runs through the internet so it’s pretty much free, unlike text messaging.  It has multiple ways you can use it for business means including: internal team communications; customer support; marketing and promotion.
Cons	Not many companies currently use whatsapp for business.  I think this is really a pro disguised as a con.  What it means is that if you can creatively think about ways you could use Whatspps in your business you can be ahead of the game!  You could set the example.

Platform Name	Instagram
Monthly Active Users	1 billion
Key Demographic	Those in their 20s and 30s, Instagram has, in some cases, replaced Facebook for many people due to its simple, image based interface.
Pros	It can be used to direct message other users even if you’re not following each other!  It has built in photo editing software so that even the most rubbish pictures you have taken look amazing.  It integrates tags and hashtags seamlessly.
Cons	The focus on photos means users are less likely to read content so find a way to integrate text into your photos.

Platform Name	Twitter
Monthly Active Users	330 million
Key Demographic	Millennials and Stephen Fry
Pros	Like Instagram the ability to tag others and utilise hashtags is hugely beneficial.  This means you are easily able to keep up with the latest trends and see what people are looking at on a daily basis.
Cons	You can only message people if you both follow each other which, although is marginally restrictive, does make sense because of the number of celebrities who would otherwise receive mountains of spam.  You also have a limited letter count on Twitter so be succinct.

Platform Name	Reddit
Monthly Active Users	330 Million
Key Demographic	Predominantly Males aged 25-34.
Pros	A platform which openly encourages discussion on anything and everything it differs to other social networks because of its high levels of interaction.  These discussions are split into categories or ‘subreddits’ to make your subject matter and audience easy to find.
Cons	Some people only use Reddit to act as the opposing party so be prepared for what can often be unnecessary and time-consuming debates.  It can be easy to take things personally on Reddit so make sure you spend some time detaching yourself from your online profile for the sake of your sanity

  Stay tuned for tomorrows post where we will be talking about some of the smaller social networks which can be equally as useful for your company.