Understanding Social Media Channel Selection Tools
To understand what a social media channel selection tool can do for you, you must first understand what a social media channel is and how it can play a part in your business.
Social media channels include social sites, video/picture sharing sites, blogs, micro-blogs and forums where your brand name may potentially be discussed either positively or negatively by visitors. In general, these are sites that you may have a direct presence on. These include:
- YouTube
- Your direct website and/or blog
Using social media channels allows a business to interact with their customers and potential customers, create campaigns, and build on their company visibility. A social media channel tool exists to assist you in determining which channels your business presence will benefit the most from.
When utilizing the tool, you should be looking for answers to a few key questions. Where will the company fit best? What impact will a particular channel offer? How feasible is it to have a company presence on any particular channel?
Once you are ready to make use of our channel selection tool, you should pursue a number of areas. First, we recommend you will rank your criteria, using information such as expected reach, cost versus benefit, market positioning, resources for implementing a social media presence, and more. Once these criteria are ranked according to the importance you have assigned them, you will then assign a percentage of importance.
The next step is to list out the various channels available today and assign weight, or importance, to each one. You will rank each channel as to how you feel they will fit in with the percentages you have assigned to each portion of the overall goals. You will then sort by selecting all social media channels, channel scores, strategic fit, impact, and feasibility. Once done, you will then choose data and sort and then sort by channel score, largest to smallest.
A bubble matrix will provide you with a highly visible, easily understood rendering of which social media channels are the best choices for your company. Larger bubbles equate your best choices while the smallest can be considered channels that you may want to do away with altogether. Those left can be analyzed for potential use in the future.
To summarize, the use of our social media channel selection tool allows you to evaluate a multitude of social media channels, each of which will be assigned a ranking of importance by you to draw final conclusions as to which social media platforms you will find the most success in utilizing.
