Should You Cultivate a Brand Presence on All Social Platforms?

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Lee O'Connor: I don't think you have to be on all of them. I think you want to have presence throughout social, but I think if you're on Twitch and you're a gamer, and that's your bread and butter, then, you know, it's going to be harder to build a new audience on YouTube than to garner and grow that audience in a place that you already are. I think if you're-- you guys can speak better to when you're just getting started and things like that-- because I think it's almost great to throw it out there and then see what really sticks, and then home in on something like that, too.

Denise Alison: I would say the recommendation of being on all the platforms is not a great one. Because you just need to decide and determine where your ideal customers are, and where your audience is going to be, and really put the focus into that. What happens when you try to be on everything-- say, you try to be on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch-- everything gets diluted. You get stretched too thin, and you don't really create a really good presence in one place. So to create one really good presence on one of the platforms is going to serve you much better, as long as your audience is there, than trying to do everything. I always recommend people to choose one, and really go for it. Once you start getting things happening there, you can choose one or two supporting ones, but not trying to be everywhere because your audience isn't necessarily on all of them. So it's really about meeting them where they are, and finding where they are, once you know who your target audience, or your target customer, is.

Elizabeth Giorgi: I'm going to just say it. I'm somewhere between the two of you, where I would say that just like anything else in life--whether it's sandwiches, salads, your clothing, whatever--one size does not fit all. Whatever platform is right for a brand, just adapt for that platform. For example, something that we see often is, we have a lot of clients who are like "We are Facebook Live. We only do live on Facebook because we have the biggest audience there for live." But then we'll take, maybe, that speaking event, or that table-side conversation, and then we'll edit it into a few 30-second highlights for Twitter, because on Twitter, that's where their audience is, getting the most value is from those little nuggets. Maybe we've got a five-minute composition that's the highlights of all the best of the best that goes on YouTube. That fractional aaproach of saying, "What is the best piece of this content? How can we maximize the value of what you've created over here" to really duplicate, triplicate, and really grow the effort of what you're doing here as a brand.

Denise Alison: I really like that point. There's a lot of power in repurposing your content, and Lee can probably speak to this, as well. You might, like Liz said, do a Facebook live, and then cut out the pieces of it and create other types of content. So it might be 30-second videos, it might be 3-minute videos for LinkedIn, but the same approach doesn't really work on all the platforms because there's different nuances, different audiences. So taking the live video, taking the MP4 video, chopping it all up and repurposing either the video content, or even taking static images and turning them into Instagram posts or Instagram stories or LinkedIn content, Twitter content. That can be a great way to create more content without one, just spamming all of your platforms with the same stuff, but also giving people something different to interact with.

Elizabeth Giorgi: I have this one client who is a publishing house, and they'll do these really formal live steams on YouTube, where it's tableside Conversation with the coffee cup, and it is extremely polished and perfect and it's high-end production. And then afterwards, we go into the green room with the authors, and the authors will do an Instagram live that's extremely casual. It's all the talk that we didn't have a chance to talk about, all the questions you didn't get to ask before. That hybrid approach to saying, "Okay, we're already spending a ton of effort to get all these right people in the room. We're getting all of us together at this time. We've carved out this production resource to be able to make this happen. How can we maximize then, just the value of the talent that we've put into this room to get an additional value out on Instagram, or get an additional value out on Snapchat." Any of the other platforms where you're going to have a one-to-one style conversation with your audience.