Social media can be a very powerful tool for your brand, especially with the popularity of social commerce continuing to grow With retailers getting in on the action and so many different platforms, it can be hard to know whether or not a social network is right for your brand. After all, you have limited resources and social media won’t work for you if you just throw up profiles everywhere and never spend time interacting.

To help cut down on the confusion, here are a few questions to ask in order to qualify whether or not a social network could be worth it:

1. Is the social network brand-friendly?

This is perhaps the most important question you can ask for your brand. If a network is not brand-friendly, you’re going to spend a lot of time listening and building relationships there for very little return, and potentially even a backlash from the community.

A good indication a social network is brand-friendly is simply whether or not other brands are using it. Aside from that, check for other brand-friendly features. Usually, a brand-friendly social network will have the following:

  • advertising options
  • page options aside from individual accounts/profiles
  • metrics on your account
  • openness to 3rd party solutions or apps

2. Why?

A big question to ask is “why,” not how many. Just because a social network has a ton of users does not mean it’s a good platform for your brand and brand messages. Instead of focusing on the number of users, think about why users are on the platform. Figure out what they are doing and how they are behaving, particularly when it comes to content.

Sharing content happens on every social network, even if it’s just text-based status updates. A real indication of potential, from a content-sharing point-of-view, is whether users are sharing and resharing content on that social network or on a different platform. If users share within the platform, your brand has the potential to share content there as well and increase the reach of that content. You can figure out if your content will have a place by looking at:

  • how content is promoted/elevated
  • what kind of content is shared
  • what kind of content is popular
  • whether or not brands are accepted by the users
  • what types of content other brands share

When it comes to social networks, it’s not a quantity measurement – it’s about quality. You have to get into the network to: understand its users, their purpose on the platform, see what they are doing, and listen, instead of immediately blasting your message before you know whether or not there is a place for it.

3. Does your audience use it?

Another huge factor to consider is your audience. If your target audience does not use a particular social network, it’s probably not right for your brand, even if it is brand-friendly. In general, you want to be where your audience is; so, if they’re using a social network, which also happens to be brand-friendly, you should be there too. Check to see if the site demographics match your target and if you can’t get a good picture from that, you can always survey your customers. But, if your audience doesn’t use the social network you’re considering, then it doesn’t make much sense for you to use it either.

4. Can you leverage it uniquely?

If you want social media to work for you and provide an ROI, you need to go in with a plan. Instead of just dabbling and playing around, go in with a strategy and with goals you can measure & analyze to make decisions. You need to figure out how to provide outstanding, useful content consistently – something that will make your users engage and want to keep engaging with you.

Figure out what kind of content you can provide to inspire engagement (are you a “visual” brand? do you have video content/talent? etc.) and get started on building relationships. You can’t start selling on day one, so make sure you spend time listening, learning, understanding, and building relationships first.

5. Does it work for you?

This one is all about determining ROI, which means it’s mostly for social networks you’re already using. If you’ve been active on social without a strategy or goals to measure, then you may not have the data you need to determine an ROI just yet. If that’s the case, then start strategizing, create some goals, and then collect data over time to check if what you’re doing is working. When you’re testing whether or not a social network is working for you, you want to make sure the data you’re analyzing is from actually trying to reach goals, not just posting for the sake of posting. Other ways to test a network, especially if you’re just starting out with it, are to:

  • observe user engagement
  • launch a pilot campaign to build & engage followers
  • test various marketing angles
  • compare efficiency to other networks (this requires you to have that data on other networks for yourself)
  • make tweaks and start all over, if necessary

If a social network passes all of the tests and your audience is interacting with you on it, you don’t want to write it off because one of your campaigns didn’t perform. In this case, it would be better to tweak your approach to see if you can get the results you need, instead of labeling the network as not right for you. You don’t want to waste your time, but you don’t want to miss opportunities either!

People used to be on social to connect, not to buy or shop; social commerce may be changing that, but you still need to build relationships first before trying to push them into sales. If your brand acts as part of the community, offering value to the community, then you can get a better reaction when you are trying to sell later in the journey.

When it comes to social (even if it’s commerce), just remember: you have to gain trust and build a relationship first before you can sell.