Earlier in the month, we remained closed to clients but spent the week working on our company goals and the business. When you’re so busy week to week with clients, it’s often your own business that doesn’t get the attention, so we really were keen to spend the time chatting, sharing ideas, brainstorming and making sure everything is in place for a great 2022.

During one of our brainstorming sessions, we were putting down a list of social media top tips. The ideas were mainly for Reels on Instagram, but the discussion soon led into whether we should use TikTok, should we branch into Clubhouse, or use Spaces on Twitter.

It did get me thinking – we are, as a company, quite used to the same platforms we’ve always used: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. We definitely embrace any new updates and changes, and make sure we make full use of the functionality. However, when new platforms come about, how do you decide if you should spread some more energy into them?

For example, we use the four platforms above on a regular basis, and we also blog. That’s a lot of work for a small business, but given our field of expertise we want to lead by example, and be present online.

A few people have said to me over the past 12 months how we should definitely get onto the other platforms. We’re looking at TikTok, Clubhouse, Reddit – and there are surely more. How do you choose which platform to use then? While also recognising the fact that there are only a certain amount of hours in the day, and you do need to actually work to bring money in to pay the bills.

My trail of thought then went onto analytics (naturally). However how much can you trust those? I know that a lot of our enquiries for the business come via Facebook and word of mouth. Yet our analytics would suggest we do very well on Instagram and Twitter. Of course, we know to take analytics with a pinch of salt, they don’t give you the full picture – but that makes it harder for me to decide if we do put more time into a new platform or not, and do we do that in addition to the efforts we already have in place.

The next thought then is the target audience – for us it’s a fairly wide audience. We target small businesses and organisations, and staff of those businesses and organisations who may be interested in websites, WordPress training, social media and digital marketing. It’s quite broad, which is why typically, we’ve felt the 4 platforms we currently use work well. For example on LinkedIn we focus on business to business posting, perhaps on Twitter it’s more focussed towards organisations than small businesses. Each platform has its own merits, and it’s own strategy from us.

Of course, I suspect the answer is: we won’t know until we try, which is very true. Do we put in some extra time for trialling a new platform to see how it works for us, while trying to repurpose content?

What would you do?