Is Social Media the right engagement strategy for all target audiences?


All Social Media strategies begin by defining goals/objectives. From the reading and anecdotal research undertaken, it is apparent that there are substantial differences between the target audiences social and web strategies for Businesses, Non-Profit and Government. The first graph is an indication of which ages should be targeted by Social Media strategies. The primary difference is when to target the different age groups. ‘Businesses’ have been broken down by sector type because depending on what your organization does will contribute to the strategy your organization aims to achieve.

It all comes down to who you want to engage, and at what point they become valuable as consumers. No organization should ignore Social Media as a platform because even if the users are not the target users today, getting their engagement early will pay dividends in the future

For Canadian usage stats and more information please click here

Moving onto the second graph. In terms of which Social Media platforms should be used, looking at the average of the above target audiences, Non-Profit should primarily use Facebook to engage in a fun, viral way and generate awareness. Government should tread with caution around platforms that are build on interaction e.g. Twitter and should not be on things like Google+ yet as this portal is too new and thereby has yet to have an established user base. Businesses should predominantly used LinkedIn as it remains the only professional Social Media platform. It is clear that each organization needs to define their strategy first before embarking on the execution of a Social Media plan

  • http://www.cyclaudiia.com Claudia Cheung

    I think your brought up a good point of when your content becomes valuable to your consumers. It definitely is so easy to just spew out content for your target audience, but we might forget that timing of when you give out this information is important too.
    I also agree very much with you on the fact that Google+ is such a new platform that organizations such as government agencies should be considering to use that the least because of their objectives. Nonetheless, at the end of the day it really depends on the strategy an organization wants to carry out to decide which platform is the best.

    Great post Raheela! :)

    • Raheela

      Thank you, Claudia.
      I appreciate your insightful feedback!

  • http://www.kaybeephotography.com Kurt Budiarto

    “No organization should ignore Social Media as a platform because even if the users are not the target users today, getting their engagement early will pay dividends in the future”.

    I love that! I think I am going to quote you on that.

    Yes, certainly no entity should ignore SoMe completely even if there is minimum engagement in the said SoMe networks. Early birds will always get the worms and in this case, early entrants will reap the rewards later. Have a good day, Raheela!

    • Raheela

      Thanks so much for your comment, Kurt. I really appreciate your comments and you can quote me anytime :)

  • http://supriyashrivastava.com/ Supriya Shrivastava

    Thanks for this post Raheela. It shows the clear thought process when it comes to explaining the infographic. I completely agree with the points made above in the comments as well.
    You are right, the Government needs to be careful on platforms that open up a two-way conversation. They must not unless they have invested in training their staff.

    • Raheela

      Thanks, Supriya :)