You will be able to match a buyer to the platforms they are most likely to use, using evidence rather than trends.
Mei Ling bakes custom birthday cakes from her flat in Punggol. You may remember her from Digital marketing foundations. A friend told her last year that TikTok was where everyone was now, so she opened an account and posted twelve videos in a month, and a few of them did well, mostly with teenagers who commented on the frosting. None of them ordered a cake, because the people who order her cakes are mostly parents planning a child's party, and they were somewhere else.
That is the most common platform mistake a small business makes. It picks the app that is getting attention this year and then tries to find buyers there. This lesson turns that round.
In Digital marketing foundations you wrote down who your buyer is: a person narrow enough to picture, with a problem you solve. Keep that person in front of you now. The question is not which platform is growing. The question is where this person already spends their time, and what mood they are in when they get there.
Mood matters as much as presence. Someone opens LinkedIn on a weekday between meetings with work on their mind. Someone opens TikTok on the MRT home to be entertained. Someone searches YouTube on a Saturday because they want to learn how to do something. Someone scrolls a Facebook group for their estate to find out who sells good kueh nearby. The same person might do all four in one day, and each time they are open to a different kind of post.
Mei Ling's buyer is a parent in their thirties planning a party a few weeks out. When she pictured that person honestly, she saw someone saving cake photos on Instagram, asking in a parents' group on Facebook or WhatsApp for recommendations, and occasionally watching short videos at night after the kids are asleep. TikTok had a place in that picture, but her buyers did their deciding on the other two.
Every platform changes its features and its audience over time, so treat what follows as a broad sketch and check it against the evidence you collect yourself.
TikTok is built around a feed of short videos chosen for each viewer, much of it from accounts they do not follow. People open it mainly to be entertained, and its users have tended to skew younger than Facebook's. Instagram mixes photos, carousels, Reels and Stories, and people use it both to follow friends and to browse brands, food and places. YouTube is also a search engine: people arrive with a question and stay for an answer, and Shorts sits alongside longer videos that can keep earning views for years. Facebook skews older and is strong for groups and local communities, which matters if your buyers are parents or residents of one estate. LinkedIn is where people think about work, so it suits a B2B consultant, a recruiter or a financial adviser building a professional profile.
None of this tells you where your buyer is. It tells you what kind of post each place expects. Platforms publish audience information in their own business help pages, and the details change, so look there rather than trusting a chart that has been passed around for two years.
The best evidence costs nothing. Ask five customers, or five people who match your buyer, which apps they open every day and which accounts they follow for your kind of product. Five answers will not give you a statistic. They will often give you a pattern, and they beat any survey about Singapore users in general, because they are about your users in particular.
Mei Ling sent a short WhatsApp message to five past customers: "Quick question for a small project. Which two apps do you open most days, and do you follow any cake or baking accounts? Where?" Four of the five named Instagram as one of their two apps and three mentioned a Facebook parents' group. One said TikTok, and added that she watched it for fun and never bought anything she saw there. That took Mei Ling one afternoon and saved her another month of posting in the wrong place.
Keep the question short and specific, and ask about behaviour rather than opinion. "Which app do you think a bakery should use?" invites a guess. "Where did you last see a cake you wanted?" gets a fact.
The second source of evidence is what businesses like yours already get. Find three or four accounts in your category in Singapore, competitors or similar businesses in another neighbourhood, and look at each platform they use. Ignore the follower count and the likes. Read the comments.
Real comments sound like buyers. "Do you deliver to Sengkang?" "How many days in advance do I need to order?" "Can this be made eggless?" Those are people close to a purchase. Comments that are only emojis, or generic praise from accounts with no posts, tell you very little. If a competitor's Instagram is full of delivery questions and its TikTok is full of strangers saying "so satisfying", you have learned something about where buyers ask.
Priya, who runs the maths tuition centre from Content and copywriting, did this for four centres near her. Their Facebook pages had parents asking about class timings and trial lessons. Their TikTok accounts, where they had one, had students joking in the comments. Both are useful, and only one is full of the people who pay.
Your activity follows straight from this. You will put Mei Ling's question, in your own words, to five people who match your buyer, and write down exactly what they say.
Message five customers or people like your buyer and ask which two apps they use most and which accounts they follow for your category.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).