[You Don't Have to Do Everything] How Small and Medium Businesses Can Use Social Media [Improve as You Go]

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

Owners of small and medium businesses with websites sometimes ask me this question.

Our competitors put a lot of effort into social media, and I think we may need to as well. There are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LINE, and many others. What are their respective characteristics... and which should we start with?

This article answers those questions.

Social Media You Can Use for Business

There are also LinkedIn, Pinterest, Wantedly and others, but for now it is enough to understand the five listed above.

Which Platform Should You Work On?

First, pick out the platforms that your target customers use regularly.

The following rough guide will do.

Also, LINE and YouTube seem to be used across all age groups.

For details, I referred to ‘Major Social Media User Numbers and Trends by Age Group Based on Published Data for 2018’ (App Club), so please take a look there too if you are interested.

Which Social Media Platforms Should You Prioritize?

To give the conclusion first, YouTube is the answer.

As of 2019, I recommend platforms focused on pictures (video) rather than text.

In sales writing and copywriting, there is a saying: ‘Don't lecture! Picture!’, and today, showing someone images or videos on a smartphone is the fastest and most reliable approach, rather than explaining things at length.

Infrastructure used to be an obstacle to showing images and video, but that obstacle is almost disappearing.

Furthermore, users are increasingly inclined to look at images and watch videos rather than read text. With improvements in infrastructure, it would not be surprising if ‘show me in images and videos’ became the norm, along with ‘reading text is a bother, so I'll skip it’.

For that reason, YouTube and Instagram are especially good, but I think YouTube, which is used by all ages, is the best.

What Do You Need to Start YouTube?

From here I would like to go a little deeper into YouTube, the social platform I recommend most.

I am also working hard on growing a channel and connecting it to sales. This time, I will focus on “getting started”.

Whatever direction you take, this is all you need.

However, there is actually something even more essential.

The Key to Working on the Web, Beyond Social Media

It is...

Look at a random selection of YouTube videos. Unlike broadcast television, aren't many of them thoroughly amateurish?

Even with camerawork, sound, and editing like a father filming his child's sports day on the weekend, don't some have plenty of views and high ratings?

When a company uploads content, people feel ‘We have to make it polished!’ or ‘We can't publish something half-baked!’.

I understand that feeling very well (this article is actually also a reminder to myself, haha).

However, when you only have a few videos, you get a few views, or at best a dozen or so. Videos with almost zero views are effectively nonexistent to the world.

A blog only starts to gain some slight recognition—often in page views—after more than a hundred articles, and apparently videos work the same way.

So your existing smartphone can be the equipment, you can appear yourself, and the content can simply be you talking without editing about what users want to know (many YouTube channels have actually succeeded this way).

On a related point, ‘Just keep uploading, even if it is unimpressive’ has proven important for websites, social media, and blogs alike throughout the history of the web.

So although I seem to have digressed at the end, ‘Once you have a rough idea, act rather than think, and improve as you go’ is the mindset I hope you will bring to this.