Visually interesting products do well on Instagram. Meanwhile, for businesses to reach other business professionals, a strong LinkedIn presence is key. So, how can you find out which platforms are best for your business or industry?

As a modern business, you may feel pressured to be all over social media. After all, people spend around three hours a day on these platforms, and that represents a great deal of time that you could be either effectively marketing your business and connecting with your audience — or perhaps be totally forgotten about as your competitors do the same.

Of course, if you’ve ever tried to start up a social media strategy, you likely learned very quickly that being active across multiple social media platforms is not for the faint of heart. In fact, managing social media on its own can take up massive amounts of time, particularly for smaller brands who are trying to grow.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be all over every social media network on the planet. In fact, you might not even need to have a major presence even on some of the world’s largest networks, because what really matters when choosing a social media platform for your brand is whether or not your audience uses it.

In order to figure out what social platforms are worth spending time on as a business, you first need to understand your audience. A lot of businesses opt for Facebook (particularly B2C companies) because Facebook simply has such a larger userbase that it’s easy to say, “Well, at least some of our audience has to be using it!”

While it’s true that a portion, or even the majority, of your audience may be active on Facebook, your decision needs to go beyond that. You need to take a lot of different criteria into account, because the social media platform you choose isn’t just about where your audience is active, but where they are most likely to interact with your brand’s content.

So, consider:

• Which platforms are your audience using?
• On which platforms is your audience most likely to interact with your content?
• What type of content is your audience most likely to interact with?

The last question may seem like it leans more towards your social media strategy itself, and begins to get away from which platforms you should be using to start with, but it still plays a role in helping you decide the platforms you choose to focus on and how you choose to utilize them.

For instance, if your audience loves spending time on Instagram and they particularly love live and behind-the-scenes style content, you’ll probably end up focusing less on Instagram posts themselves and spend the majority of your time crafting Instagram Live videos, Instagram TV, and maybe even some Instagram Stories so you can reach them most effectively.

Answering that last question can also help you narrow down platforms if your audience happens to be active on multiple platforms. For instance, if your audience loves videos, you might opt for Tik Tok and YouTube over Twitter and similar platforms.

Once you begin to think about where your audience hangs out and where they’re most likely to want to “hang out” with your brand, you can start testing the waters. After all, the best way to figure out what actually works in the world of marketing is to get your feet wet and start gathering metrics.

Continuing with our last example, maybe you know that your audience loves video content, but as it turns out, they don’t really interact with your Instagram TV or Stories after all. Instead, maybe through testing you’ll find that they prefer you to go live on Instagram or maybe even on Facebook or YouTube. You may also find that, while you post a lot of content on Facebook, it might get shared more on Twitter, or vice versa.

Of course, going in blind and trying to learn everything from a place of trial-and-error will only put a strain on your limited resources, and that’s why the process starts with as much research as possible, allowing you to understand your audience so that you can make educated guesses and do your best to try and get it right, right from the start.