Hi, everyone. I’m Kristyn Brophy, Director of Client Strategy at LISI, where we help lawyers, law firms, and legal service professionals excel in their marketing initiatives and strategy. Today, I want to talk to you about choosing the right social media platform for your practice, or your brand, or your business. There are a lot of social media platforms out there, and each one has its own use case or each one caters to a certain demographic and a certain type of content.

While you can be posting all of your content and repurposing it for all of the platforms, It’s really important to choose one and focus on one to build your presence and build your brand for your practice and effectively communicate your goals to your audience on that social media platform. Once you excel at that first one, the rest will snowball and follow.

So how do you choose which platform is right for you? First, you want to ask yourself some questions. So when you’re going through, ask yourself what are your goals you know, who are you trying to communicate with? What are you trying to communicate on that social media platform? Are you trying to generate business? Is that your goal, or is your goal to build brand awareness or grow a community or network?

So establish that goal, and that will help guide your social media platform choice. Second, who is your audience? What do they look like? What problems can you help them solve? Where do they live? What are their demographics? The more you can narrow down those details, the easier it will be to choose your platform. Three. What are your limitations or your restrictions?

Be realistic with yourself about your comfort levels, whether it be getting on video, creating graphics. Do you have the time and effort to create the flashy graphics that are necessary for one platform? Or would you rather just write something and not appear on video at all? Four. What are your competitors doing? I like to run a competitive analysis for my clients on social media because, it’s much better… because it’s important to include that in strategy.

(Not much better) because it’s important to include a competitive analysis in your strategy for social media so you can meet your competitors where they are and finally put all of those questions together and decide which platform is right for you. So each platform has its own use case and its own demographic. The four that we mainly focus on at LISI, or for professional services individuals, are, in no particular order:

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. There are also some use cases for additional social media platforms like TikTok or YouTube because they are really growing in popularity and a lot of people are using them effectively for video. So which one is right for you? Facebook is where you build a community and you build your relationships. Twitter is where you might be putting your news, your relevant articles, it’s how you get quoted in the media and you use that as a public relations tool. It’s also really useful for communicating with your audience at an event. If you’re using LinkedIn, that is the number one social media platform for business professionals to grow their personal brand online and gain their, grow their referral base, and grow their referral network.

So you can create business connections and network there. Instagram is about building a community and showing the softer side or the culture of your practice, or your business, and it’s very visual. You can’t put a lot of links on there. You can only have that one link in bio. So you have to be really careful about the messaging in your captions.

And then if you were to do TikTok or YouTube, that’s all video all the time. YouTube has over 2 billion users, so it’s a great platform for getting your content in front of someone, but it has to be video. And then same thing with TikTok. 675 million users as of last year in 2021. You’re going to get in front of a lot of people, but it’s very difficult to stay active on TikTok. And that’s all I have to say about choosing the right platform for you.