Finding the Right Audience on Social Media

Are you reaching the right people on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? Understanding and finding your target audience on social media is so important and you could be missing a trick.

It’s well worth spending time thinking about who you need to connect and engage with on social media. It’s all about seeing past the obvious. Who is interested in your product or service? Is there anything unique about your brand that could appeal to a certain audience?  What else are those people interested in?

It’s also worthwhile connecting to the people who are connected with/influence your target audience. Think of them as friends of friends – news travels quickly through word of mouth. So, think about who these people are, which industries they work in, what they read, what motivates them, age ranges, personality traits, technical know-how, and how likely they are to use social media. By doing this you could even discover some less obvious people that could be great for you.

Once you’ve profiled the people you want to connect with, you need to find them. This is an on-going process and takes a little time. Start with people you already know – your customers or people who could potentially be customers.  Look at their profiles and where they are.  This will give you a good idea of which social platforms you should have a presence on – and keep your mind open to niche sites and not just the big ones.

Identify your key influencers. These could be people that stand out within your communities, people that others listen to, people that create action (not necessarily those people with thousands of Twitter followers). They could be peers, journalists, thought-leaders or other stakeholders. People with game-changing opinions and ideas. People who challenge the norm. Or simply people that talk sense.

There are also various free monitoring tools to track who is talking about the keywords associated with your business such as Google Analytics or Social Mention. These show who has a big presence in certain subject areas.

Every social platform is different and because of this you should tackle finding your audience on each platform differently

For example, on LinkedIn search for the names of those people you’ve already identified with by using LinkedIn’s search box. Also make the most of the advanced search feature. You can also use this search box to search for keywords that might be included in profiles. Make the most of using Boolean searching – using OR or AND in these searches to include a few keywords (OR allows you to look for any one of those terms in the profile, AND allows you to look for a number of words). You can also search for people using their email addresses.

Finding your audience on social media can be time-consuming but it is absolutely essential if you want to get the most bang for your buck so to speak, on social media. 

Never forget that social media is just online networking.  At a network event your purpose is to find, and connect with new people. You wouldn’t refuse to talk to someone at an event because you didn’t know them.  So why would you turn down a (genuine) connection on LinkedIn for example.  You NEVER KNOW WHO THEY KNOW.  That annoying recruiter asking you to connect might be connected to the main buyer at your target prospect.  Quite likely actually – if they are recruiting in your niche – that they would be connected to some influencial people in your client / potential client companies. 

OK – so you don’t want to connect with recruiters – fine. But the same principal applies – if you are not sure why that (graphic designer/bank manager/marketing consultant….add your own….) wants to connect with you – so what?  Have a look at their profile, see if you can spot how many connections they have and if their connections are open or private.  Either way – if they have a decent number of connections then who knows who their connections are and how many of them could be potential suppliers, customers, staff of yours – if only they knew about you.

The same applies to Twitter – you can’t choose who follows you but you should be actively following back anyone who is a genuine account / has a relevant number of followers (that depends on your own following and your market) / is in your area (whatever that may be).  Because if you DON’T follow them back they may unfollow you and take all their followers with them.  You see – every time you tweet – all THEIR followers see your stuff.  You should also actively UNFOLLOW anyone who doesn’t follow you after a certain period of time (it’s up to you we use 4 weeks – people have holidays you know!).

And once you have built your following – it is then all about following up with relevant people – just like in real networking.  It’s great grabbing a handful of business cards at every event but unless you do something with them, that will get you nowhere fast!   It’s the same with social media – but that’s a topic for another day!

If you have any burning questions on social media let us know and we will try and get back to you, or we will answer them during our FB Live sessions – Learn at Lunch. Look out for details on our FB Page, our LI page, our website or Twitter.