Quality Over Quantity: Niche Platforms in the New Decade

Social media platforms have been gaining users exponentially since the turn of the century, with the biggest ones such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter boasting up to a billion users per platform. The emergence of social media marketing has only added to this steady proliferation, and — as I’m sure every person can relate to on a personal level — these big platforms have become the ultimate breeding ground for customer-targeted advertising campaigns. However, with so many users with so many interests around the entire world, are these big platforms the best option when looking to target a specific audience? With a marketing team and analytics tools, yes of course! Especially with the tools that these social media networks provide for your strategic benefit. But an alternative, extremely productive strategy is the use of niche social networking platforms.

Niche social network platforms are smaller, specified platforms that usually serve a distinct topic and its fanbase. Some examples of these platforms include: Untappd (beer enthusiast geo-friendly platform), Twitch (live-streaming video game platform), Nextdoor (neighborhood-based community platform), and Strava (a dynamic fitness community platform). As you can already ascertain from this short list of examples, niche platforms serve communities of all shapes and sizes. In fact, the sole similarity between all of these networks is that they serve fervent audiences — what a good characteristic to share!

So how can focusing on these niche platforms benefit your social strategy game? Well for starters, with the passionate audiences that niche platforms typically serve, you already have a steady stream of consumers whom you know are willing to readily engage with your product — provided you target the appropriate niche platform for your brand. Instead of finding these communities on bigger platforms first, you can target them immediately and engage them in conversation surrounding your brand. After all, if the users are active on these niche platforms, they’ve already shown an above-average level of commitment to a certain topic — if your brand is a part of this topic, these are the users that will be ready to talk and support you!

In addition to an efficient path to a loyal, passionate audience, niche social network platforms can be beneficial to your social strategy through the use of influencers. Now of course, the bigger platforms have influencers as well, but these influencers tend to be independent and can be expensive to hire. Niche platforms gives a company the opportunity to embed internal promoters for their brand. Take a platform like GoodReads for example; a publishing house could reach out to authors they work with or even customers in an established GoodReads community and create a partnership in which these settled niche platform users can influence their communities to pay attention to said publishing house and their products. This is technically possible on larger platforms as well, but it’s very hard to become an effective influencer without months and months of work, effort, and money from the influencer to gain the sort of traction needed to be useful to your company. With niche platforms, the path to influencership is much easier to manage. Of course, you can still choose to pay an independent influencer to do this outreach work for you, but this embedded small-scale influencer strategy is one that the niche platform can champion as well.

Strava, as explained previously, is a niche social network platforms for runners, bikers, swimmers, and fitness fans galore. Communities can share their fitness journeys and accomplishments while connecting with like-minded individuals from around the world to talk all things exercise. Strava is an example of a niche platform that has influencers working on its channels, and one such influencer is Chris Froome — a British-Kenyan cyclist who sports over 200K followers on the platform! He posts consistently on the site, and, most notably, is always wearing his INEOS-sponsored gear in his photos. Here we have it: an athlete that is already sponsored by INEOS, a lucrative chemical company, working to spread the INEOS brand to his established follower base on Strava. He posts consistently, uses the network’s various tools to attract more and more followers, and uses his platform to enhance the recognition of his sponsors.

Niche social networking platforms provide an alternative, more specified approach for your social strategy, and if you haven’t invested time in researching these platforms and their benefits — start now! These platforms can especially benefit local-based companies because there is a subsection of niche platforms that focus solely on location-based networking. If you can find the right platform that caters to the locality you’re trying to target, you can really broadcast your brand into these favorable communities. Whatever your brand strategy is, you simply must put some thought into the use of niche social network platforms in your marketing strategy. They serve their fervent audiences well and can create a profitable relationship for your company.