At first glance, all social media marketing might seem roughly the same to you. But each major platform has distinct features and advantages. And it is worthwhile for you and your social media marketing professionals to discuss how each one can best be leveraged in support of your overall campaign.

Some differences among platforms will become evident once you take a close look at the user interface. Instagram is a particularly obvious outlier because it is primarily image based. Twitter is known for brevity of its text presentation, but this doesn’t set it as far apart from Facebook these days as it did when the Twitter character limit was half as long. Instead, the differences today are more nuanced, with Twitter having a more linear presentation that presents you with each piece of unique content in sequence.

Social media marketing inevitably has to utilize different approaches in order to achieve organic interaction on each of these platforms. And those differences extend to the purchase of pay-per-click ads, as well. Although your brand message may be generally the same across different platforms, there are meaningful ways in which you can change its presentation to make it more appealing within the atmosphere of various sites.

These differences might consist of a greater or lesser emphasis on image versus text. Adjustments to font, typesetting, and diction are all important ways of refining the aesthetic and tone of your content. And as important as it is to experiment with these things in order to maximize the impact on a general audience, it is just as important for your social media marketing to pin down the specific changes that help an ad to cross the boundaries between different platforms.

The differences among Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. should already be familiar to your social media marketing team. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a single formula you can follow in order to re-shape your brand message for each platform. The specifics depend upon a lot more than just the site on which you’re placing an ad or building a following. What’s just as important is a fully-articulated social media marketing strategy, which takes into account the different ways in which your target audience is represented on different platforms.

If your product or service is focused on an older clientele, chances are that you’ll want to put more of your marketing focus on Facebook than on Instagram. The opposite applies if your ecommerce is aimed at women. Instagram tends to skew younger and also has a higher proportion of female daily users. Twitter is predominantly male but enjoys a fairly even split among age groups.

In theory, any demographic group can be reached on any social networking site. But a carefully managed social media marketing campaign snatches the lowest-hanging fruit first. Then, once it’s clear what’s working for your core audience, it begins to branch out, experimenting with a range of different approaches to capturing the attention of less well-represented groups on each platform.

This, of course, is a long and labor-intensive process. But if your social media marketing company gets it right after the first few months, the process of building engagement becomes more and more streamlined with each new ad you run and each new piece of content you offer up to your followers.