A friend once told me how to manage my money. He said, “Step one… get some money.” I think we can say something similar when trying to use social media for marketing. Step one… know your audience. Who are you trying to connect with? Who will care about your content? Once you clarify your buyer personas you can begin to take the steps to find those people on social media and engage them with genuinely valuable content.
@TheRichBrooks shares some great advice in his article on the Social Media Examiner blog. There are a number of tactics to use and they vary by platform. These are ideas you need to understand if you are serious about making a real impact using social media.
Jim Anthony – So-Mark Founder
Orig Post www.socialmediaexaminer.com | Re-Post So-Mark Consulting 1-27-2016
Are you struggling to connect with your customers on social networks?
Do you know where they hang out online?
To optimize your social media marketing efforts, it’s important to know who your customers are and which social networks they spend their time on.
In this article you’ll discover how to connect with your target audience on social media.
#1: Identify Your Ideal Customer
One of the first questions I ask is, “Who is your ideal customer?”
Some of the answers I’ve received include women, people who have to eat to survive, bosses, employees and people looking for work. While these answers may be true for you, too, they won’t help you find your audience because they don’t help you prioritize where to spend your time.
John Lee Dumas has famously talked about identifying your business avatar. This means you’ll want to create a fictional persona of your ideal customer, to the point of naming it, knowing how many kids it has or what it does on the weekends. The clearer your avatar is, the easier it is to find people on social media who resemble the persona.
#2: Determine Your Audience Size
Once you have a good sense of what your audience looks like, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to estimate the size of your audience.
For example, if you want to reach women in Maine who are interested in nutrition, you can find out that 62,000 people on Facebook match that audience.
This is also good business information, because if your audience is too small, you may need to change your offering to expand your audience. On the flipside, if your audience is too large, you might want to target a narrower niche to start.
Of course, not everyone is on Facebook. According to recent research, almost 60% of Americans are on Facebook. That number may be more (or less) depending on where your audience lives, their age, gender and household income, but it’s a good starting point.