When it comes to choosing which social media platforms to use within your business, it’s a good idea to choose wisely based on where you’ll find your target audience. Different platforms attract different kinds of users, so take a look at the facts and figures below and work out where you can tailor your content most effectively.

Facebook

Key Demographics: 31 million UK users, 49% men, 51% women. 87% of 19-29 year-olds have a Facebook account, but that only falls to 67% for those aged 65 and over.

Best for: Direct follower engagement. Facebook can be a fantastic tool for creating communities around your brand and getting honest and quick feedback on products. Creating transparent discussions within Facebook posts also increases the brand’s reputation and the likelihood that followers will be converted into customers.

Less useful for: Posts reaching your target audience. Facebook algorithms and updates are making it increasingly difficult for business pages to get their message across. The positive side to this means that the content that does reach users is relevant, engaging and organic. Time to up your marketing strategy game.

Twitter

Key Demographics: Interestingly, despite having half the amount of UK users compared to Facebook, Twitter’s 15 million users have the same split between men and women: 49% and 51% respectively. There’s a steeper drop across the age ranges however, with 37% of 18-29 year olds using the site, but only 12% of 50-64 year olds and 10% of those 65+ using an account.

Best for: Constant, short and impactful messages. No algorithms mean that if someone’s following you, your tweet will appear in his or her timeline no matter what.

Less useful for: Targeted advertising. Twitter doesn’t offer the same useful user profile information that sites like Facebook do; so attempting to target a particular demographic can be difficult. Hashtags and trending topics can be helpful with this, but it still relies on the user actively searching for content related to that particular theme.

LinkedIn

Key Demographics: Interestingly, 79% of users are over 35. There’s a slight male majority amongst users, with only 42% of users being female. LinkedIn is still growing fast, and currently has over 10 million UK users.

Best for: Professional business communication. LinkedIn is probably best known as a job-hunting website, but using LinkedIn as a business can also benefit you greatly if you have a greater B2B focus. It’s also a fantastic tool for connecting with on-going clients and keeping them updated, and it provides a more professional point of contact for business communications

Less useful for: Casual or playful marketing. LinkedIn users mean business, and a degree of professionalism is expected across all areas of the site. Whilst you can create posts and presentations within your company page, in general LinkedIn is not the place for marketing strategies which use colloquial or overly-personal language.

Pinterest

Key Demographics: More than 72 million users worldwide, with a massive 85% of these users identifying as female. More than half of all Pinterest users are aged between 18-49. Also interesting: 83% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity.

Best for: Creating boards that feature links to your website. Create the right balance of boards between those which link to your blog posts, products and services, and those that provide lifestyle tricks or creative, on-brand inspiration for your customers.

Less useful for: Direct customer service. It’s unlikely that someone will go to Pinterest in an attempt to engage with your business directly. It’s more a place for sharing new ideas, trends and images. It’s also not a great place to include mountains of text (such as entire blog posts), as it’s a very visually and creatively orientated platform.

Instagram

Key Demographics: Instagram doesn’t provide UK-specific demographics, but it does have over 300 million users worldwide. A massive 90% of these users are under 35, and whilst in the past women made up two thirds of users, the split between men and women is now much closer to 50/50.

Best for: Creating a simple but strong portfolio for your brand. It should feature a lot of product photography (if that’s what you sell) or frequent photos of happy customers enjoying the service you provide (for hairdressers, event planning, fitness classes etc.). If your business involves a lot of meet-and-greet networking, then photos of these events will also help to keep your Instagram fresh and compelling.

Less useful for: Linking customers to your website. Instagram doesn’t enable clickable links in captions and comments, so whilst you can include a link regardless, the content needs to be engaging enough that potential customers or connections will then access the link independently via web browser, rather than just clicking through a hyperlink (getting a customer to leave Instagram mid-browse to visit your website is no mean feat).

By Olivia Rose French

Olivia is an expert writer, blogging specialist and Copywriter at Shake Social.

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Info Sources:

The Demographics of UK Social Media Users

http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/demographics-of-key-social-networking-platforms-2/

http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/pinterest-statistics-for-businesses/