The launch of social media platforms in the early and mid-2000’s changed the way businesses were able to communicate with their potential customers – but social media has changed dramatically since its inception and modern platforms offer much more for business in the way of tools, tracking, and overall assistance for business. When looking at a business development agency, they’ll often feature programs for implementing different social media strategies to help with business development, but is it the tool it once was?
One thing to consider has certainly been the changing diversity in audience across all platforms and how different social media platforms favor a different demographic now too – where Facebook used to be the biggest all-rounder, it now focusses on an older audience as younger demographics have moved away – similarly platforms like TikTok which have become the biggest in the world tend to focus on a younger audience through a difference medium. When looking to use social media as a business development tool, it’ll be important to understand how these different demographics are targeted, and which are the best fit.
Next to consider is the type of media that can be promoted on these platforms – with the same examples, Facebook have their own marketplace and ads driven platform similar to what would be experience through Google and Google Ads, as well as having opportunities to use text, images, and video too. Other platforms such as TikTok have a much heavier focus on short video content only. Adjusting content to match the social media platform for the most engagement is vital and with so much analytical data available behind posts on these platforms too, it’s easy to see where a campaign may have gone well, and where one may be lacking behind.
Finally comes the engagement – and good business development plan will factor in user engagement whether from the start of their journey, or right through to the end of their journey, and it’s a very important metric to follow to judge if social media is still the right tool here. Larger influencer channels receive very positive engagement but it’s important to discover the value, bots and automated software have muddied the waters of engagement so finding ways to make social media a viable business tool is still up in the air.
Whether or not it’s the right tool for business development may yet come down to what industry the business operates in, how effective the content can be, and what sort of engagement is required too but it can still be a very useful tool when implemented correctly into any business development strategy.