In the world of social media, shiny new platforms pop up regularly. It is so tempting to get caught up in the hype and set up a presence on each new arrival for your charity. But do you really have the time to manage them all?

If you’re wondering whether your charity is managing too many social media platforms, you should ask yourself the following questions.

Where is your audience?

For any marketing channel, the audience is always your starting point. Different social media platforms tend to be used by different demographic groups.

Start by understanding who your target audience is by creating digital marketing personas. They should include hints on likely age, gender identity, and geographic location as a minimum.

Cross-reference your personas with what you know about the user demographics of each platform. For example, if you are targeting an older audience based outside of urban centres, you might find Facebook a good match.

For younger inner-city types, Instagram might be a better fit. If you’re looking to connect with a particular group of professionals, Twitter or LinkedIn might be the place to start.

Where are your communities?

You can also do a bit of research on each platform to see if any communities you would like to work with are gathering there. If you want to reach people who are managing a particular health condition, for example, you can do some social listening to find out whether they are getting together on the platform you’re considering.

On Facebook, you might search for relevant groups, on Instagram or TikTok you can search for relevant hashtags. For other platforms, you can use the search function. Search functions on social platforms are really effective because they are a gateway to new and exciting content for users – which also makes them great for research.

The demographic info for users isn’t that great on a country-by-country basis, so you can be surprised and find a very active and relevant community on a platform you wouldn’t expect. #ArtTikTok was in TikTok’s top ten niche communities in 2020, for example. 

Reddit is often overlooked as a social platform but brings together all sorts of niche communities from across the internet. Charities have found it to be a great place to connect with gamers, for example.

Are you local, national, or international?

For local communities, Facebook is often a hub. If you are a local charity with a site that is open to the public, you can add your location, business hours and perhaps even set up a group to help support local people. For younger audiences, Snapchat’s SnapMap offers interesting ways for users to interact with real-world locations.

For national charities looking to target broader audiences, YouTube can often be overlooked. Research shows that in the UK, users spend more time on YouTube than any other platform.

International charities will find that the mix of users for each platform will vary, sometimes quite dramatically, from country to country. The platform with the most users in the UK is Facebook, but in China it’s WeChat.

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What content do you have?

Different social media platforms are designed around different types of content. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit are primarily text-based platforms; TikTok and YouTube are primarily video-based; Pinterest and Instagram are image-based.

It’s worth asking yourself what types of content and content creation skills you have. If you don’t produce video or have a budget to get support with video creation, having a presence on a video-based platform might be an uphill struggle.

How much time do you have?

This is a really critical question. How much staff, freelancer, or agency time do you have to manage your charity’s social media? It would be great to have a clear answer to the question: how long does it take to manage a social media platform? But there isn’t one! There is always more you can do to improve your presence on a particular platform, which is why it is so important not to spread your social media managers’ time too thinly!

Hootsuite suggests that you can manage a social media platform in just 18 minutes a day (1.5 hours per week), but their list of tasks doesn’t include any time for content creation, scheduling, or chatting with other team members about content they would like to squeeze into the schedule. Perhaps a figure of five to ten hours per week is more realistic.

It can be hard to make the decision to ‘drop’ a platform because it feels like a loss or a failure. But it should be easy to choose the well-being of your overstretched social media manager or the opportunity to do a spectacular job on fewer platforms. Pressing pause on one platform might be a step towards different successes.