‘How Much Land Does a Man Require?’ is a Russian short story by Leo Tolstoy about a farmer who get a chance of owning all the land he can walk around in a day provided he returns to the starting point before sunset.
Overcome by greed, the farmer ends up running all day and dies of exhaustion by the time he reaches the starting point at sunset.
This 1886 story holds the key to a fundamental question every social marketer faces—on how many social media sites should you market your brand?
Should you choose Instagram just because you can buy Instagram followers real cheap and jack up your presence without too much effort? Should it be a numbers-only approach where more is always better than less and greed is good? Or, is it all about quality over quantity, although how exactly is one going to compare quality of social marketing sites?
How Many Sites Do You Need?
Finding the answer to this question will become a lot easier if you treat your time at par with the capital available for your business. No entrepreneur ever has unlimited capital, and smart business is all about allocating this capital in a sensible and productive manner.
With a fixed number of man-hours that can be allocated to social marketing, your site-selection process should focus on identifying the best and most productive social marketing destinations for your brand.
The first step would be, obviously, to prune the list. Plan on making videos to promote your brand? If not, then perhaps YouTube can go off the list. No audio content either? Then no SoundCloud too.
Lots of memes? Perhaps Instagram then. Infographics? Then perhaps Pinterest will be a better choice.
Remember, these are not final choices. This is merely the first step where you prepare a list of five to eight sites that would be most suitable for your social marketing strategy.
Once you have this list in hand, it is time to analyse your social audience. Would you be targeted direct customers or other businesses? What kind of content will facilitate maximum engagement with your target audience? What about the demographics and other traits of your target audience?
These questions should naturally lead you to your best options. Unless you are a big firm with deep pockets and a big social marketing team, the sensible thing would be to start small—say with just two or three sites.
