CATEGORY: Brand Monkey News, Top Tips
Jackanapes: Social Media
POSTED ON August 14th, 2024
by Holly Lucas
Which social accounts work for you?
Not every social media platform works for every business. They each have very different audiences. It’s better to choose fewer and do them well rather than open accounts on everything, particularly as there’s a new social media platform that opens every month. Let’s be honest, most of them fizzle out after a few weeks. People like what they know! I mean, who here is still using Threads?
Social media platforms and their demographics
Tiktok
834 million users worldwide. The average use is 55.8 minutes per day – the most of any of the platforms. It has a younger audience and is entirely video-centric. Funny and entertaining videos are the most popular and there are lots of chances to show your personality. B2B marketing on the platform rose to 16% in 2022, which would have been thought impossible a few years ago. Check out our top tips for using Tiktok.
Over 3 billion monthly active users. It’s not used so much by younger audiences, with 49.3% of users aged 25-34. Facebook is preferred as a way of keeping up to date on news or to message family and friends.
Over 2 billion monthly active users. It’s image and video-centric with 69.1% of users under 35. Instagram is often used to research brands and products as there are far more influencers on this platform compared to its sister site, Facebook. We are visual creatures after all!
Twitter (aka X)
541 million monthly active users. Now Elon has got his fingers into it, X is a bit of a marmite platform. Many new changes have been introduced, including removing the block feature (a big mistake in our opinion). X could be on its way out, but for now, it’s definitely an opinion site and generally text-based. The age of users is similar to Instagram, but leaning towards the older side.
950 million LinkedIn members worldwide. 60% are aged 25-34. It’s definitely a B2B platform as it’s often used as a job-searching site and great for connecting with other businesses.
There are of course more platforms – Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube and WhatsApp to name a few, but those listed above are really the main ones where your business or brand will thrive and achieve the most sales potential. It’s important to keep on top of social media trends and demographics as things can change at the drop of a hat.
Jackanapes socials
After a lot of research into our target markets and the types of demographics we wanted to hit, we honed in on three social media platforms; Tiktok, Facebook and Instagram.
@jackanapes.shop Up your Mexican #Salsa game with #Jackanapes #HotSauce - Available on #Amazon UK #chilli #chillies
♬ Standout - Kid Dean
Tiktok
Tiktok has a much younger audience and chilli challenge videos are popular on the platform. If we were able to reach the hot-head audience, there were potential opportunities for collaboration and promotion of our product. Influencers are a huge benefit to businesses. If someone with 80K followers were to try our hot sauce, that’s a huge pool of potential customers we could reach.
Whilst Facebook is not as popular nowadays for businesses, and the algorithms are forever pushing against them on the platform in favour of making it a more personal space for users, there were some factors that swayed us.
- It’s still used primarily by an age range we wanted to hit
- Linked with Instagram so shows our consistency across the business
- Audiences tend to presume you will be on Facebook if you’re a legitimate brand
Despite not being used by a younger audience, it still has a huge number of users. The format of posts would also allow us to create content with a little more copy attached.
With our wonderful graphic designer on board and our target audience in mind, it seemed silly not to use Instagram. There are so many influencers on the platform that we could potentially collaborate with, and as an image-heavy site, it meant our graphic designer could create some quirky posts that really stood out on our profile page.
Instagram has been leaning more toward video content lately, with reels being pushed by the algorithms more and more. As we already had a few ideas for video marketing content, we thought this could lend itself to a more cohesive set of social platforms.
The pre-launch
In the lead-up to launching our product, we wanted to come out with a bang. For the whole month, we posted teaser videos, graphics and content to drum up initial buzz and interest in the products. We also created a newsletter signup and offered discount codes for the launch. This followed a technique we often use when launching crowdfunding campaigns.
@jackanapes.shop I don’t meant to brag, but I’ve been told I’m kinda hot! Tap on the link in our bio #jackanapes #hotsauces #chilli #comingsoon #summertime #bbq #Food #jams #maythesaucebewithyou
♬ Chillest in the Room - L.Dre
The launch
Once we’d launched our product, we started to create a more structured set of posts. Whilst we generally posted similar things on each, we made sure to create each post individually to suit the style of the social media platform it was being posted to.
Currently, we’ve settled on daily themes.
- Mondays – Did You Know posts featuring facts about chillies. This way we’re not just posting sales content. A good split is 80:20 – that’s 20% sales and 80% other content.
- Tuesdays & Thursdays – lifestyle shots of the products. As Amazon only allows up to 7 images on product pages, we have plenty of lifestyle content from our photographer. These are generally used as our ‘sales’ posts, usually created into a colourful graphic that matches our other content with quirky sayings.
- Saturdays – video content. We wanted to focus on creating recipe videos which include our products. These are short, snappy videos with trending sounds to help boost our potential reach. TikTok prefers videos to be created and edited in the app, which can then be shared elsewhere. Recipe videos can be great ASMR content, plus we’ve made sure they’re really clear and simple to make. Whilst the videos get put on Instagram reels, we’ve also been creating recipe cards that go out onto our feed as well.
Outside of these themed days, we’ve been posting extra graphics Sian, our graphic designer, has created, such as ‘Pass the Sauce’, ‘Choose Your Chilli’, ‘Website Live’ and ‘Live on Amazon’ to name a few.
The stats
For full transparency, here are our stats coming in from Instagram for the month of August 2023:
The insights tabs are excellent ways of monitoring how your posts are doing on each platform. Not only can you get information on accounts reached and interactions, but it also highlights the demographics we’re meeting. We can see we’ve reached more men than women, which is something that could influence our future marketing campaigns. We can also see that our 2 similar lifestyle shots had a huge difference in accounts reached – the first reaching 164 accounts, the most recent, 1601! Despite being very similar posts, it really highlights how unpredictable social media can be.
The algorithms are often changing, so what works one week may not work the next. It’s all trial and error and not getting too hung up on numbers of followers and reaching millions. Better to have fewer followers who buy your products than thousands who never would.