While setting up a social media presence – or strengthening an existing presence – is an obvious move for your business to make, you could easily stumble when it comes to choosing where exactly to be active on social, with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest all beckoning tantalisingly.

A thriving social media strategy would not depend on you using every single available channel. In fact, your attention could be spread overly thinly if you fail to follow the tips below…

Who are your target customers?

One reason why you should adopt a selective, rather than exhaustive, approach to choosing social media channels is that, otherwise, too much of your time and money could be wasted on channels where your target customers are not even particularly active.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be too difficult to refer back to your existing customer personas as you assess the demographic profiles of different social media portals. For example, if you are pursuing a female audience, Pinterest is evidently a good place to be, Forbes shows.

Which channels are especially suited to your brand?

The female-heavy user base of Pinterest can also make it an especially convenient site for use in promoting fashion products. Also counting in Pinterest’s favour here is its highly visual interface, a strength which the site has in common with Instagram.

You should carefully consider facts like these when trying to endeavour how well a particular channel would align with your company’s brand and industry values. Instagram and Pinterest also come with e-commerce-friendly features like product tagging, as Business 2 Community explains.

How are your rivals faring on social media?

This is a particularly useful question to ask yourself, because you could effectively learn from those competitors’ mistakes – and, of course, successes – on their chosen social channels.

Once you have determined which of those channels the companies are using, analyse how well the brands are performing on those channels. If certain channels are not delivering the right returns – in terms of engagement or followers – for those brands, consider avoiding those social media sites.

In assessing the different companies and channels, think about how often the former are posting and whether their followers are quite the type of audience that you had expected.

What exactly do you want to achieve on social media?

Once you have determined where exactly you should be active on social media, you should turn your attention to deciding on the specific goals to work towards. This is important because it can assist you in settling on what type of content you ought to develop for sharing on the channels.

Whether you aim to improve your customer service, foster a steady stream of traffic to your site, convert leads, build a community or simply spread brand awareness, your content – and calls to action – should be geared towards helping to make all of this possible.

If you hit a roadblock, digital marketing services from a provider like Climb Online could help you to overcome it.