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
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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