/ How to determine the best channel for your service
Alexander Wijninga
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4 min
The Netherlands has many different, wildly popular social media channels. To optimise your customer service, it is desirable to be present on the channels where your target audience is. On these you can set up your webcare/customer service, content marketing and social media advertising. Would you like to know how best to determine the best channel for your service and which channel is suitable for your company? Then read on quickly.
It is important to choose the right channel, because this determines which part of your target audience you are going to reach. When you know where (the largest part of) your target audience is, you can place content and advertise in a very targeted way. Research by Buffer shows that 89.3% of companies see social media as an important part of their marketing strategy. With social media you come closer to your target audience than ever, you handle customer questions and complaints directly and you determine who sees your advertisements.
Which channel is important for your company depends entirely on your target audience. To give you a picture of which audience is where, and which characteristics can be attributed to the various social channels, we have put together an overview for you below. The best channels for your service are the channels where the largest part of your target audience is to be found. This channel deserves the focus within your marketing strategy.
WhatsApp is the most used in the Netherlands. Almost every Dutch audience, from young to old, is to be found on WhatsApp. This medium is not quickly deployed for campaigns, but WhatsApp is a handy channel to use for your customer service. Customers can easily send a message from their smartphone on the medium they are already on all day. That way they can ask questions quickly and in a low-threshold way, which means you bring in more leads. Is it getting busy? Then bring in a chatbot to handle all the frequently asked questions immediately.
After WhatsApp, Facebook is (still) the largest social media channel in the Netherlands; it is also the channel experiencing the biggest decline. Young people under twenty are often not active on Facebook, but prefer to look at Snapchat and TikTok. Do you want to reach people over 20? Then Facebook is a profitable channel. Are you a florist, for example, and is your target audience around 40 years old? Then through Facebook you can easily reach a large part of your audience to show them how fantastic your floral arrangements are.
Instagram has been the fastest-growing social media channel for years. The audience between 18 and 40 years old in particular is easy to reach on it. Instagram is a fast and visual medium and advertising on this channel is most profitable by means of good designs. This channel is used a lot by clothing shop owners, for example. By simply uploading photos of your dazzling designs you easily build an online catalogue. On top of that, Instagram also offers the possibility of creating interaction with your audience by means of polls in your stories.
The most business-oriented of all social media channels: LinkedIn. It is therefore extremely suitable for informing your target audience. Here, above all, post articles or facts that genuinely offer substantive added value for the consumer. You will also find a large part of your target audience here: consumers between 20 and 64 are to be found here. Entrepreneurs with a clearly defined field in particular benefit from this channel: you can easily advertise on particular hashtags or consumers' job titles. LinkedIn is also very suitable for recruiting staff; very favourable for recruiters!
When you want to put your webcare on the map, Twitter is a suitable place for it. Funny webcare messages from Twitter are often shared on other channels, which increases your reach. Take a look at the accounts of Coolblue or Bol.com for inspiration, for instance. Twitter in itself is no longer a very popular channel, which means advertising is no longer very profitable.
TikTok and Snapchat are enormous social media channels and are used a lot worldwide. Snapchat has 218 million users, and TikTok counts more than 41 million users within two years. Most users are between 13 and 24 years old. Do you want to advertise on these apps? Then pay attention to the trends that are relevant on the apps at that moment.
When you decide to invest in a social media strategy, you will have to deal with more traffic on your website. This is of course what every company wants, but whether every company is really ready for it... Extra traffic also means more pressure on customer service. So make sure at all times that your customer service is big enough to handle this pressure. Would you like to deal with more people with fewer staff? Then bring in a chatbot. A chatbot catches all the first-line customer contact and makes sure a large part of the customer questions are handled immediately. That way you quickly catch 85% of digital customer contact.
Perhaps your target audience has a favourite channel and is most present there, but there is a good chance your audience is active on four or five channels. Why would you avoid the other channels when you can use them all? Watermelon offers a platform on which you easily and without programming build a chatbot and implement it on all social media channels. All conversations simply come in on one platform, which means you do not have to keep switching between one channel and another. A chatbot can then also answer the frequently asked questions that come in, so that hundreds of customers receive an answer at the same time, and on various media. Does the chatbot not know the answer? Then a member of staff easily takes the conversation over. That way everyone is dealt with quickly and it does not matter at all how many channels you are reachable on: there is always someone available! Curious? Try it yourself and create a free account.
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