Reach your TG better with these niche social media platforms

Vandana Baria, Content Marketing Specialist, lists niche social media platforms that can help start-ups create a mark for themselves, basis lessons from her own experiences.

Struggling with low impressions and mortifying conversion rates on mainstream social media channels? Can’t figure out how to reach those millions of people that these social media platforms boast of? If it is any consolation, you are not the only one trying to find answers to these questions.

Reaching people organically on Facebook has become a thing of past and the very concept of Twitter makes it impossible for a brand to be heard over others without a small promotional push. Many small to medium businesses and new entrants, who do not have excess money to burn, often find their voices drowned out by the cacophony of big brands on traditional social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and now Instagram.

This was exactly the situation in which the social media manager of DesiDime, an online shopping community, found himself in. That’s when the team suggested going after Quora, a question answer forum, which resonated much more with the shopping forums of DesiDime, where people collaborate to get answers to their shopping queries.

Voila, it was a successful strategy from day one. A bunch of answers started getting an impressive number of impressions and clicks and even a decent number of sign-ups. The lesson learnt? Put your efforts in the right direction; take your communication to a place where your potential users hang out. And that might be the niche social media platform that works for you.

Thanks to the explosion of sites like Facebook and Twitter, rendering them too generic and crowded, a number of smaller, niche social networks have cropped up on the social media scene and this only means good news for social media marketers. It offers them an exciting, new prospect of connecting with a greatly targeted audience with minimal effort.

Instead of spreading yourself too thin on Facebook among a billion disinterested users, connecting with a highly targeted audience of a thousand people would be much more productive. Because what is more important than reaching a huge number of people is reaching people who are more interested in you and your product.

So, here are some niche social media platforms that might work much better than Facebook or Twitter for you:

Roposo

Roposo is by far India’s best social network for all things fashion. It is a community of fashion enthusiasts sharing and discovering apparels, accessories, tips, and fashion stories with each other. With around 2 million app downloads and 300 partner websites, Roposo has amounted to around 24 million shopping minutes till October 2016.

A similar international site is WeHeartIt, where people discover and share wonderful, inspiring images in various categories like fashion, creativity, shopping, jewellery, friendship and photography.

The Review Monk

This is a place where movie buffs gather to express and share their opinions on Bollywood movies, and connect with other film enthusiasts. The Review Monk aggregates some of the best publications and film critics to get a more realistic rating for Bollywood movies and encourages interest in classics and meaningful cinema.

Hashnode                                                                                                                 

Hashnode is, in its own words, the premier social network for developers. It brings together software geeks to help them hone their programming skills. It gets more than 600 thousand visits and features over 1 lakh active developers every month.

Wattpad

World’s largest network for writers and readers, Wattpad connects its members with stories by the people and for the people. Commanding 45 million plus monthly visits and a session time of around 30 minutes, Wattpad is a great medium to make your story heard and talked about, among interested people.

Slideshare

A part of LinkedIn since 2012, SlideShare is the top destination for professional content. With over 18 million uploads in 40 content categories, it is no wonder that this site attracts over 200 million visitors a month. This is the place where infographics, presentations, videos, documents are searched and consumed by millions professionals.

This list is the just the tip of the iceberg. When you start exploring, you will find that there is a community or a social network for almost every kind of niche group you can think of like students, teachers, artists, science lovers, gamers et al. Just ponder over the fictional persona of your ideal customer, figure out which of these networks s/he might be frequenting and connect with them there.