When building an online business, it’s smart to think about evergreen marketing. Social media marketing can be evergreen, but you really need to understand how to capitalize on it in order to build a great online business.
Which social media is best for making money?
It’s a simple question, but the answer depends on a number of factors that only you can answer. Let’s map out the factors that you need to navigate in order to decide on where you should place your effort.
Which Social Media Is Best For Making Money?
The best social media for making money is the one that: allows you to easily reach a large number of your target prospects, allows you to leverage your own skills and talents, and provides your content with a long runway so that more people see it.
Forget the tiny handouts that social media platforms fork over to creators – the real money comes from selling something to your audience: courses, memberships, products, tours, etc. Anybody can make money on a number of different social platforms, but we’re talking about making serious money here, not a few hundred bucks here and there.
The grand strategy behind using social media to make serious money is to get in front of as many possible buyers as possible. Making serious money means bringing people from the social media platform to some page in order to convert them from prospects to buyers. You’re doing the same thing if you build a social media following and then sell ads or product placements – you’re just giving away most of the money that you could be making to the company that’s hawking their goods.
So, do you want to collect an allowance, or do you want to build a fortune?
The Social Platform That Allows You to Reach a Large Number of Your Target Prospects Easily
Smart marketers will focus their marketing on a tightly defined niche. Prospects in that target niche will tend to congregate on some social media platforms more than others.
Your job as a marketer is to find out where your target prospects are, and then meet them there. You want to dig into their online habits, figure out where they tend to meet with other prospects in your niche to discuss (or listen to others in) your niche, and then craft your social media strategy so that it focuses on that social platform.
Even if your prospects tend to use a number of different platforms, you’ll find that they tend to gravitate more towards one particular platform based on age, their psychological profile, or other factors. For example:
Facebook (Meta) – Middle aged, fairly mainstream. Lots of different groups and interests are represented.
Twitter (Now X) – Middle aged, Russian trolls, fairly mainstream, strong political and economic content. Also used by news junkies.
YouTube – Wide range of ages and topics covered, very mainstream.
Instagram – Great for photographers and graphic artists, including painters, and drawers. Wide range of ages.
Snapchat – Very young crowd, good for targeting Gen Z, etc. I’m a Millennial, so I don’t have a huge amount of insight.
TikTok – Great for targeting the very young & “hip” crowd, Chinese bot farms, about a range of subjects.
Yes, your prospects will probably be on different platforms, but they’ll tend to concentrate on one or two platforms more than others.
So, what niche are you entering and where do prospects in that niche hang out online?
Answer that question and you’ll really tighten up your marketing strategy.
The Social Platform That Allows You to Leverage Your Own Skills and Talents
Even if you find that your target audience mostly hangs out on one particular platform, there is still a really good reason for shifting your focus to one of your target prospects’ secondary spaces.
If you have talent in one creative area over another, then it’s wise to focus your effort on the platform that allows you to leverage your talents to your best ability.
For example, I’m good at writing, but not as good at video… so I tend to focus my time on writing SEO optimized articles rather than doing YouTube videos. Other founders will be better at video, or podcasts, than they are at writing, so should focus on pumping out YouTube or Instagram videos, or producing podcasts to distribute over a number of channels. If you’re great at memes, then Twitter (now X), Snapchat, or Instagram may be for you.
Ultimately, you will do your best work and produce a lot of relevant content for your target niche if you focus on utilizing your existing skills and talents. Production there will come easier for you, and your work will resonate more with your target audience.
So, take a hard look at the sort of output that comes naturally to you, and focus on the platform frequently used by your target prospects that also allows you to put your skills and talents to their best use.
Which Social Media Platform Provides Your Content With a Long Runway So That More People See It?
Not all social media platforms are created equally. Some social platforms focus on providing users with timely information that ages quickly. Marketers who focus on those platforms need to produce content on a daily or hourly basis to reach their target audience.
This is what’s referred to as the content treadmill. You need to keep running (producing) in order to just stay relevant.
Compare this to a less sexy medium, such as writing articles for Google search. I can write an article and, if I do a good job optimizing that article for search, the article will remain relevant and reach my target audience for years. I can put in an hour or two of effort and get years worth of marketing reach for it.
You won’t get that sort of staying power with a platform like Snapchat. So, Snapchat marketers will have to expend much more effort every day to reach the same number of prospects that I’ll reach by spending an hour writing an article.
This is something to really think about if you’re lucky enough to have multiple platforms where your target prospects gravitate and where you can make the best use of your talents.
In the end, the social media platform that is best for making money will be the one that allows you to easily reach your target prospect, leverage your natural skills and talents so that you can produce engaging content easily, and will give your content staying power to maximize the reach it has over time.
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