The pressure to start using social media to promote yourself and your goods and services is coming from all angles. If you aren’t posting pictures on Instagram, are you going to miss out? If you don’t have 10,000 Twitter followers, are you going to be less successful than other competitors who do? How do you decide which platforms and tools are best for you and which ones will give you the best results for your time and effort?

The first thing to assess is where you live online for your personal profiles. If you are a happy Facebook user who is comfortable with the way that it works and you post a solid stream of updates there on a fairly regular basis, it might make sense for you to add a business page to Facebook and use it to build your business profile. If you have never used Twitter, don’t really understand how it works and find it hard to write short posts, jumping into Twitter for your business may not really make sense. Best to stay where you are comfortable while you are starting out and then try more things later when you are more confident.

Next, consider what kind of content you are going to be producing as this will have a big effect on the tools you use to deliver great results. If you’re an accountant, it’s unlikely that you will produce a lot of photos of your work and it is much more likely that you will be writing a lot of ‘how to’-type posts. In this case, jumping straight onto Instagram and creating a profile there may not be the wisest move to make and a WordPress blog supported by a Twitter account to enable sharing with your followers may make much more sense.

It would also pay huge dividends to look at your competitors and other key players in your sector and identify what is working really well for them. Using infographics to share highly factual and statistic-heavy chunks of information could mean that Instagram is worth a try but it might also be relevant to look at using infographics with lots of colour and images as one-off posts to give some variety to your written posts and draw in some new followers on a Facebook page. The competitor review is a key step in working out what is the best approach to take with the kind of people you are looking to engage with and will help you come up with a great plan. Results tend to be much stronger when you go to places where people are already engaged and then use similar tactics yourself than try to convert people to something new.

The key here is to avoid opening accounts on every platform in a rush to cover all bases and then use one account over all of the others and leave the rest to die a very slow and painful death. The other accounts will look very sad and empty when your customers or clients look you up online before deciding to do business with you and the impression you want to create is quite the opposite – regular, recent posts showcasing your products, knowledge, skills and services that encourage followers to learn more and start to engage with you and your brand.