Now that you’re focused on achieving a few simple social media goals, it is time to do a little more digging before posting anything, and define who exactly you need to talk to in order to fulfill your goals.
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To match your social media goals, you need to segment your potential audience, so that you know what message to send, and to whom:
Audiences can be very different from one social network to another.
Segment audiences by gender, education level, preferences... 64% of LinkedIn users have a Bachelor’s degree vs. only 23% on Youtube.
An effective way to get to know your social audience is simply to ask your existing customers about their online and social habits.
Beyond email for simple questions, you can craft a survey using free online tools such as Google Forms, SurveyMonkey or similar tools.
Your existing clients and potential customers are not the only social audience you should be interested in.
Influential bloggers, specialized journalists, industry leaders, as well as your own suppliers and partners are all specific audience groups you should know about.
Using the “Find Friends” button or "People that like <topic of interest>" function are great starting point to connect with high-potential social media groups on Facebook.
Twitter has a special search URL that will let you spot prime twitter accounts and handles related to your business. For instance, if you’re operating a food truck in the streets of New York, you can find great Twitter resources to follow and get followed by.
You can also use the advanced search function on LinkedIn to find potential connections, successful influencers and competitors.
Through their respective ad platforms, major social networks offer irreplaceable insight on high-potential audiences.
Similarly to Adwords, these platforms let you extensively research specific profile-based and location-based audiences, whether you end up buying an ad or not.
Whether or not you plan to spend money in social media advertising, you can use the Facebook Ads module to find out the actual size of a potential social media audience segment.
The easiest way to go about defining your audience is to characterize it, literally. As John Lee Dumas puts it, you need to unleash your business avatar by imagining the perfect audience personae you want to address.
Is it a man or a woman? How old is he/she? Where does he/she live? And so on, until you can mentally picture your “avatar” sitting in front of you, ready to hear whatever it is you have to say.
As a small business or startup, you just won’t have the resources to fire in all directions at once, so the obvious solution is to focus on a group of customers which will best enable you to fulfill your objectives.
Focusing on your “business avatar” you will still need to further identify subgroups such as decision-makers, influencers, or buyers.
“You can’t get too narrowly focused when you first start” says Dumas, who strongly refutes the idea that concentrating on a clear-cut profile will leave most of your customer base left out, as you’ll feel more comfortable to address them as if you were talking face to face.
Getting to know your current and potential social media audience is a crucial step in developing an efficient and successful social media strategy.
You can find out more about your social media audience by studying how your clients, partners, suppliers and competitors behave on social networks.
Building an ideal social media personae is a great shortcut to define your own style and build a long lasting brand development strategy.
There are many tools available that can help you find precious insights on who your potential customers are, learning to use them will give a tremendous edge over competitors on social networks.
The Pew Research Center has interesting and stats-filled research about Demographics of Key Social Networking Platforms and The Demographics of Social Media Users.
Rich Brooks recaps key points and shares basic tips to jumpstart your social audience research.
Mashable can tell you more about growing your social media audience, and answers other strategic issues such as “Agency vs. In-House” social media management.
MarketingLand shares actionable tips on how to segment your social audience.
Thanks for reading this extract. This is just one step, and we have a lot more tips and tricks for you in store.
To uncover all the secrets of mastering social media for your SMB, get your own free copy of SeoSamba's guide: just click below to download Social Media Strategy for Small Business in 7 Easy Steps.
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