3 tips to help you organize your Social Media Channels for your business

We live in the era of messaging overload. It’s true that there is a multitude of social media channels to ride on to share your content and to promote your business, product, service or brand. It can, however, often be overwhelming when it comes to decision time:

Do I share my travel blog on Facebook?
Where are the audience for my ‘How to choose the correct treadmill lubricant’ YouTube tutorial?
Are Instagrammers going to purchase my travel photos?
What can I even do with the 280 characters of a Twitter post?

If you are here your larger question is ‘Which Social Media Channel should I use for my business?

To answer this question, let’s look at the question you should be asking: ‘How do I organize my Social Media Channels so I make the most of them?’

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Here is your breakdown.

Social Media Channels can be categorized into 3 groups.

The Source Channels:

This is where your content resources are. This is where you come to be inspired, to discover, to stay on top of trends so the content you create is attractive, relevant, and engaging. Think of websites that offer video vectors for your YouTube and Vimeo accounts. Further, there are stock photo sites that provide inspiration and new ideas for your Flickr account, or sites that offer help with creating charts, infographics. Consider reports, and graphs that quickly and efficiently help visualize your message to be posted on a visual search engine such as Pinterest, or any of your main channels for clarity.

The Source Channels are where you come to create, treat this as your creative sanctuary, and everyone needs one!

Distribution Channels:

Think of these social channels as your courier service; these are what carry your message and your content to the people who matter to your brand.

To determine your Distribution channels, you need to ask 3 questions:

What is my message, what am I trying to sell?
Who is my audience, who is it most relevant to?
Where can I find my people?

That’s right; Distribution Channels are invaluable places to gather your audience – your own social recruitment space. Remember, busy CEO’s sitting through four meetings a day won’t have much time to read your teaser reveal on ‘Top 3 Baking Secrets for Amateur Bakers’ posted on LinkedIn. Although, they might be inclined to click on a link leading to content on ‘How NOT to Fall Asleep on a Continuous Meeting Day.’

Jokes aside, Social Media Distribution Channels can be determined and customized with research on demographics and interests of people on those channels. Twitter is a typical Distribution Channel, with space for just a few words; you can use it as a teaser to hook in your audience to your main site or social channel. Other examples for Distribution Channels are Facebook and LinkedIn, but of course, this would depend on the audience you have in mind.

Destination Channel:

Your Destination Channel is your source of revenue generation. It is the proverbial golden goose that puts the bread and butter on your table. This is where you want the audience you gathered in your Distribution Channels to end up in. It is always better to have one, very focused Destination Channel than many fragmented storefronts. This channel is usually your main website or virtual store. If you’re a travel vlogger, then your YouTube channel could be your destination site. And, depending on the product or service you offer, other social channels such as LinkedIn and Tumblr too can work for you. The important aspect to remember is that your Destination Channel should be determined by the content and by the audience interested in it.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be on all social media channels to be effective, that’s a lie perpetrated by the FOMO crowd (Fear of missing out).

Pick the ones that help you create, help you draw traffic to your main site, and of course keep improving the one that brings in the revenue. Measuring all channels will provide the necessary insights enabling you to make a data-driven decision.