Social Media Marketing: Foundations to Practice · The Social Media Platform Landscape
Choosing Platforms Based on Audience, Not Habit
The most common platform-selection mistake is defaulting to whichever platform the marketer personally uses most. This chapter covers a more disciplined approach.
Marketers frequently default to the platform they personally use most, or the one that was fashionable when their team first built a social presence, rather than the platform their specific target audience actually spends time on. This produces a mismatch that can persist for years, since a brand can post consistently and still underperform simply because its content is reaching the wrong platform's audience entirely.
Key Takeaways
- Defaulting to a marketer's personally familiar platform, rather than auditing where the target audience actually is, is a common, persistent mistake.
- Platform selection should be grounded in customer data and analytics, not general reputation, and revisited periodically.
- Doing one or two platforms well with native content tends to outperform spreading effort thinly across many platforms.
- Platform choice should be revisited as the business and the platforms themselves evolve, since the right fit can shift over time.