Guide to social media channels

Hello everyone, this article will be focusing on which social media channels are most appropriate for your childcare business. With a sea of potential social media channels to choose from, it becomes very confusing as to which ones will be worth dedicating your time to. The truth is that there isn’t one answer that fits every business, it completely depends on what your marketing objectives are. Below are some common marketing objectives and the social media channels which will help you achieve these objectives:

Increasing your brand awareness – Consider using social media platforms that have been around for a considerable time. For example, Facebook would be way more effective compared to Tik Tok.
To make more business connections- Consider using LinkedIn as it’s renowned for solely business purposes meaning those using LinkedIn are more open to business opportunities.
To sell your product/service - Consider a channel with more visual features such as Instagram or Pinterest.

Another key factor you need to consider when choosing your social media channels is which channels your target audience are most regularly using. In the Childcare industry the people you’re selling to are the parents so it’s important to look where they are most active. The Pew Research Centre published the results on the chart above. As you can see Facebook is used by the most parents, followed by Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. As we are talking about the childcare sector, the figure for mothers is particularly important so these figures may influence where you decide to direct your social media campaigns.

It’s key to analyse what your competitors are doing in the market and what is working for them. This is the same for social media marketing, you should look at your competitor’s social media channels and see where they are having the most success. For example, if a key competitor that has the same audience as you is having success with Pinterest then this may be a good channel for you to explore.

One last thing to consider when deciding which social media channels to pursue is what resources are available to you. If you have a small budget, then it may be a good idea to only focus on one or two channels and get them completely right before you try and cover every channel and end up with a half-hearted effort on all of them. Choose the channel that is most effective for achieving your objectives and that is most popular for your audience and then create regular, original, and engaging content. You should aim at releasing 3-4 posts a week as you want the perfect balance between not posting enough leading to missed awareness opportunities and posting too much which may alienate your audience. These are both common mistakes that can be easily avoided. You may have the financial resources to cover several social media platforms, but do you have the time or correct human resources to make all of them a success? For example, social media platforms such as Pinterest are all about creating beautiful, exciting designs to grab the attention of your audience. You may not have the graphic design expertise to achieve such a feat.

The information in this article is provided by Childcare Marketing and does not represent Morton Michel.