6 Steps to Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Audience
Social media is a great way to engage with your audience and get your brand out there.
But before signing up for every social media app out there, it's important to understand who uses each social media platform and how. This will help you reach your target audience more effectively. After all, a twenty-something uses social media differently than someone in their fifties.
It's also important to consider how your content works on each social channel. For example, if your brand is all about visuals and well-polished aesthetics, X's text-focused approach may not work — but you might thrive on Instagram.
During my six years as a copywriter, I've helped brands in lifestyle, fashion, and consulting grow through social media. In this article, I'll share key social media statistics, explain how to choose the right social media platforms to target your buyers, and how to use AI to adjust and boost your content.
How to choose the right platform for you and your audience
Let's take a look at the six steps that will help you choose which social media channel to use.
1. Decide on your target audience and goals
Write down who your target audience is, their age range, and what goals you want to achieve with your content. To demonstrate, I'll use my own copywriting services as an example.
Target audience: Small businesses looking to hire a copywriter to boost their digital marketing strategies. Ideally, I want to connect with entrepreneurs and CEOs who make hiring decisions.
Age range: Most likely 35+ entrepreneurs with a successful business plan that I can help.
Goal: To persuade people to hire me for freelance copywriting work.
2. Research the different platforms
Knowing which platforms your target audience uses can take a bit of research. Thankfully, we’ve done most of it for you. Match up your target audience and goals with the demographics for different social media platforms we’ve listed later in this article.
For instance, LinkedIn is popular for businesses and for the Gen X audience I want to attract. It's also ideal for sharing articles and creating text-based posts — perfect for showcasing my writing.
At this stage, you might have a couple of options to choose from — you can narrow your focus during the next step or opt for more than one platform.
3. Analyze Your Competitors
To decide which platform is right for you, check out what your competitors are doing. A couple of questions to keep in mind:
- What type of content do they share?
- Are they more active on a particular channel?
- Where do they usually receive a high level of engagement?
Answering these questions can give you clues as to what social platforms to focus on.
You can also conduct research by typing keywords into top social media platforms. For example, if you market handmade beauty products, you could type handmade beauty into Instagram or TikTok to see what type of content comes up. If you notice brands that align with your goals, this platform is likely the right one for you.
4. Consider the type of content you want to create
It’s important that the platforms you choose match your content goals.
For example, you’ve decided that video content is most effective at reaching your audience. But the products you're marketing are niche, so you'll need detailed, instructional videos. In this case, YouTube works better than TikTok, as it supports long-form content.
Let's say you're a marketing company with strong visuals. While Snapchat focuses on photo and video content, it deletes photos once they’ve been opened. On the other hand, Instagram keeps your images on your feed permanently, giving you the ability to create visual content that will stick around — which could be more lucrative.
Check out the table provided later in this article to find the platform that works best for the type of content you want to create.
5. Be mindful of skills and resources
By focusing on your strengths and available resources, you can create content that resonates with your audience faster.
A few things to consider:
- Do you have the editing skills to create engaging videos?
- Are you a confident writer who can create catchy and insightful text-based posts?
- Would you be able to put together a set of eye-catching images?
If you're on a limited budget and time frame, it's better to use your existing skills rather than learn new ones. It’s also important to consider your resources. For example, you might need to buy video editing software to get into YouTube, or a professional camera to create strong Pinterest photography.
Here are some other key resources — besides budget and time — to consider:
- Staff availability: How many people will you need to create and monitor social media content? Do you have staff available to update your platform regularly? Think about how often you plan to post content, and if there are set times you can allocate each week to engage with followers.
- Existing skills: Using your current skills instead of learning new ones can help you grow your social media faster. For instance, if you're already a confident writer, platforms like LinkedIn and X suit your skills more than Snapchat and TikTok.
6. Test and monitor
Once you've chosen a social channel — or narrowed it down to a couple — you'll want to test and monitor its performance. Each social media platform has an analytics section where you can track engagement, followers, and shares. This can help you decide which platforms to focus on. For example, you might initially think Facebook and Instagram will work best for you. But after trialing both, you may decide Facebook is more effective.
Here is an example of Facebook’s professional dashboard where you can track your performance.
I also recommend monitoring with tools such as Sprinklr, or by creating a social media calendar. Give yourself a month or two to publish and market content, then analyze the results via your social media insights.
Key 2024 Social Media Statistics
Understanding key social media statistics will help you choose the right social media platforms. Let’s take a look at key statistics from 2024.
What are the biggest social media platforms in 2024?
The most popular social media platforms are:
Which platforms are used most by marketers?
Facebook is the most popular marketing platform, followed by Instagram. Here’s why these platforms work well for marketers:
- Instagram and Facebook’s large number of users give marketers the opportunity to reach a wide audience.
- They provide a range of in-built marketing tools. For instance, you can create video, live, and photo ads, and communicate with customers via WhatsApp or Messenger. Detailed analytics mean you can easily monitor ad performance.
- Research shows 83% of users find new products and services on Instagram while 74% of users use Facebook to discover brands or products online.
Instagram was also one of the first social media platforms where brands partnered with creators to advertise. Today, Instagram influencer marketing is still widely popular. For example, the beauty brand Sephora created its own influencer “squad” of creators who promote their products.
In the example below, they achieved over 2,000 likes by sharing a video of an influencer using a lipstick they sell.
What is the fastest-growing platform?
With over 700 million downloads in the first nine months of 2023, TikTok is the fastest-growing platform. Snapchat closely follows this, and some believe it will soon overtake TikTok. Snapchat's growth rate this year was 13.4%, compared to Facebook's 1%.
On the other hand, the social app BeReal started last year as one of the fastest growing but has since seen a decline in users and downloads.
Other interesting social media platform statistics
- 79.9% of users log on to TikTok for funny or entertaining content.
- If you're targeting a female audience, Reddit may not be ideal — around 68% of its users are men. Pinterest, on the other hand, attracts mostly women.
- Most B2B companies prefer LinkedIn, while Facebook is most popular for B2C.
Which generations use which platforms?
The top social media platforms have many users, but not all target your ideal market.
Let’s take a look at which social media sites are most popular with different age groups. In the table below, I’ve listed the percentage of users under each social channel and generation, along with specific age ranges in brackets.
The percentages show that Gen Z are not as interested in LinkedIn and Facebook as Gen X are. Likewise, Gen Z favors TikTok and Snapchat, which Gen X is the least into.
Millennials are active on most platforms, including Threads, TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram. There’s a difference between younger and older millennials though, with older millennials less active on Facebook and X.
How to create and adjust social media content using AI
AI tools can help you develop and adjust content by shortening and lengthening text, changing the tone to casual or formal, generating content from scratch, repurposing content for social media, and more. Let’s look at how to make the most of your content, with help from AI.
Repurpose content
AI tool Lately repurposes content by taking blog posts and articles and dividing them into multiple social media posts. Simply paste your text into Lately to generate posts for whichever platform you choose.
Repurposing content is ideal if you have multiple social media platforms and want to create a consistent message across all your accounts.
Change tone
Wordtune’s AI Editor can make text Casual or Formal. A casual tone works best for younger and less professional audiences — often found on TikTok and Snapchat.
Professional and more mature audiences may prefer a formal tone on platforms like LinkedIn. In the example below, I added my text and clicked Formal to generate suggestions.
Shorten or lengthen text for captions and more
Some social channels have text length restrictions. For instance, non-premium X users can only write 280 characters per post.
To keep your copy within text limits, use Wordtune's Shorten feature. Or, if you’re looking to expand your copy, hit Lengthen. This can be useful when turning “sound bites” from articles into longer posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, or in-depth Instagram captions.
Here, I highlighted my text and clicked Shorten. Wordtune’s AI then offered more concise versions of my sentence.
Conclusion
By following the steps outlined in this article, you’ll be able to find the right social media platform for you in no time. Simply identify where your target audience is based on our table, and see if the platform aligns with your goals and resources. I recommend starting with one of the most popular social media platforms to reach a wide audience.
For more marketing tips, read our guide on using AI to transform your social media strategy.
FAQs
Is one social media platform enough?
While having one social media platform can be effective, it's worth having a couple of different ones to appeal to a wider audience. But if you're just starting out, it’s good to focus on growing one channel first before adding others.
Why is choosing the right social media platform important?
Choosing the right social media platform is crucial to reach your target audience. Each platform caters to a different user base, so you want to ensure you're marketing yourself where your audience is, and in a way that meets your goals.
