15 years ago when advertisers were putting a commercial up on TV (remember those?), they had to think of their audience broadly. Who’s sitting on the couch when this airs?
There’s a 42 year old woman, 39 year old man, an 13 year old girl and a 7 year old boy. For some products, the commercial needed to appeal to the most number of people sitting on that couch. Now you have those same people on the couch but this time you have the mom on her laptop and she’s on Linkedin, the dad is on Facebook on his phone, the 13 year old is on TikTok and the 7 year old is on the iPad playing a game with video ads. Now your content needs to be a lot more strategic and specific to each person on that couch.
Rather than producing one video that most people on the couch enjoy, you now have this unique opportunity to create four videos that each one of those people is going to react to. That's huge. The same company today could create a video for Linkedin that talks about their new manufacturing processes that produce less waste, on Facebook they can have another video that shows how artists around the world have created art using their logo, on tiktok they can have young people making music with their products and on the iPad they could promote their app.
Not only is creating platform-specific content great to reach more people but it also works for reaching the same person multiple times. Many of your followers might be following you on different channels and if you put the same video, everywhere, when they see it again, they’ll just keep scrolling. When you create new content that aligns with how that person is using that platform then you get an opportunity to have them engage with you again.