How Many Social Networks should your Business be on?

While it is now almost mandatory for a modern business to have an online presence, due to there being so many social networks to choose from that it can be difficult to decide where to stay active. It takes time and persistence to get anything from social media marketing – so how many networks should a business realistically be on?

Monitoring five social networking sites may help you reach a larger audience, but when you consider how much time will need to be spent in order to use these sites to their full potential your efforts can end up being counter-intuitive. You should only consider setting up multiple social networking sites when you have established a strong following and a consistent presence on one. While social media has become a useful and cheaper form of marketing, people often underestimate the time commitment needed to have this essentially ‘24/7’ online voice.

Dependent on your goals, business and voice

Whether you decide to use one or more social networks for your business really depends on what kind of business you run and what you are trying to achieve. A good bet for in-house social is Facebook purely down to it’s popularity. With over a billion users worldwide, if you can manage to sustain a good base following on here then you can assess whether it is worth moving on to additional networks.

If your business mostly relies on one type of post, whether it be text, photos or videos then it is time to consider other useful, more tailored sites. Not every social network is right for every kind of business so if you’re going to establish more than one you need strong reasoning and enough content to keep followers interested.

There is no point in creating a Vine or an Instagram for your business if you don’t have strong video or picture content, as it would be worse to have the page and not regularly update it than not have it at all.

Think of where and when your audience are active

If your followers are mostly business people who work all day, it may be more beneficial to use the more mobile-based social networks such as Twitter and Instagram, as it is more likely your followers will see posts that way. You can even research some statistics to check time of usage and various demographics and where they linger most online.

The other important point to remember is that, as a business, time management is extremely important and you need to recognise how much is too much.

The point of social media is to interact with your followers and potential customers, and by not utilising an account to its full potential, it will only reflect badly on your business. So when it comes to starting a social media presence for your business, less may be more.

By content assistant – Taylor Fleischner