Where Should You Focus Your Social Media Efforts?

When push comes to shove, it may be extremely difficult to stay relevant, consistent, and engaged across the major social media platforms on a daily basis, and employing a strategy in order to tackle them successfully could be in order.

Looking at one aspect of this on IFB today, the question at hand is whether you should focus on the platform that has already given you the most followers, or dedicate your time to expanding upon your presence and influence on the others.

Five bloggers who have incredible social media prowess, lent some insight into their tactics and gave valuable advice, found below:

Eileen Dautruche, Miss Whoever You Are

“I definitely think you should focus on platforms where you have a strong and captive audience.

You have followers there for a reason and if they trust your voice, opinion, and/or aesthetic, devoting time and energy to ensure you’re providing them with engaging and relevant content is always worth it.

That said, you don’t want to neglect the platforms where you may not reign supreme! Think of it as an opportunity, and challenge yourself by trying to build that audience, given you have the energy and time for it. I have a 70/30 split, in terms of focus between my strong platforms and the weaker ones when I try to devote time and resources to grow on those platforms.”

Tori Mistick, Wear.Wag.Repeat.

“Developing a social media strategy for your personal blog should be given as much thought as a social media plan for a client.

Not every social network is the right fit for everyone, so it’s important to evaluate where your time will be best spent.

For me and Wear. Wag. Repeat., that’s Pinterest. My blog is about a year and a half old now and I’ve had Google analytics installed on it since day one. I started to notice that I was getting a lot of traffic from Pinterest, so I started purposefully writing my posts and editing my images to encourage more pinning. On the other hand, I totally neglect my Facebook fan page for Wear. Wag. Repeat. because it doesn’t seem to drive very much traffic.

None of us have very much free time, so I recommend choosing one or two social networks to focus on rather than spreading yourself really thin across 10 platforms and only having a handful of followers on each. In this case less is more, you can develop a stronger community by focusing your efforts.”

Megan Zietz, TFDiaries

“I personally work on one platform at at time. I get my numbers to a place I’m happy with for the moment and move on to the next, making it somewhat like a cycle. It helps me stay connected to my readers from each platform without dedicating a huge chunk of time to just one.”

Vera Sweeney, Lady and the Blog

“I know this will be frowned upon by most, but I make sure to spend time each day on all of my social media platforms. I carve out about two hours a day to ensure I engage with members from the Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram communities. Ever since Facebook changed its algorithm limiting my readership to 1-3% of my actual audience base, I realized that I can not solely rely on any one platform.

One change in Facebook’s back end has permanently ruined my reach on their site. Imagine if I didn’t have the other outlets as backup?

It was a hard lesson learned and one that I will never forget. I don’t pay for the rights to use these social media sites. I don’t have a say in their policies. Therefore, I have to be sure that my bases are covered in case another platform decides to change the way they display their messages. It’s time consuming, but it’s worth it.”

Lara Eurdolian, Pretty Connected

“You should always be open to evolving. And checking your analytics and engagement level on each network to see what’s worth investing your time in.

Whenever a new social network comes out it’s intimidating to start at zero followers but it’s important to give the major ones a chance while not neglecting any channel where you have an influence.

For example, to date, I have the most followers on Twitter. This year, I decided I wanted to invest my time in growing my Instagram — I gave Vine a chance but ultimately didn’t have the bandwidth or time to make fun and creative videos and Instagram seemed to fit my lifestyle more. Growing that channel became more important to me than Twitter since I saw the potential in being able to use it as a mini blog platform where I could share my thoughts on new products and event experiences in a more visual way.

I still check my Twitter regularly and respond to my followers, I’m just not as active. As of now, I’m slated to have more Instagram followers then Twitter followers by the end of the year… The important thing is to regularly evaluate your strategy. If I was not getting such an overwhelming response to the amount of engagement and time I’ve put into Instagram, I would have put that time back into Twitter or tried a different platform.”

Which strategy do you employ and why?

(Image credit: Shutterstock.com)