As someone who manages social media for your business, you’re probably always on the hunt for new and innovative ways to explore and utilize this powerful medium to your advantage. Reaching your target audience on social media sites takes a little work and dedication, but once you have it down pat, there’s no stopping the potential for positive exposure for your company. Here are a few tips for reaching your target market on social media.
Find out What Potential Customers are Doing
Pinpointing how much time your audience spends online and where your potential customers are lurking each day is key. Americans are spending more time on social media sites than any other online activity, making social media a crucial point of contact with your audience. In fact, people spend up to a quarter of their time browsing social media networks, spending one out of every six minutes there. To meet this growing demand for content, you’ll need to incorporate social media marketing into your outreach strategy to reach the audience you’re looking for.
Check out Social Crawlytics
If you haven’t yet heard of this term, you should familiarize yourself with it. Social Crawlytics is a free tool that can analyze the social shares of content via any URL. Input the desired web address and you’ll get feedback on anything from top authors for the site to the posts and pages that are most shared. You’ll also find out on which social networks that particular content has been shared. Find your audience specifically by inputting your company web address, and you’ll find out where people are sharing your posts, allowing you to use that information to form strategies about targeted content on social media. You can even do this process for your competitors!
Conduct A/B Testing
Though it isn’t a new concept, A/B testing is a simple formula to determine success. Basically, you have two versions and a metric for successful parameters. To determine which piece of content fares better, you put both posts through experimentation at the same time, measuring which one did the best. On social media, this means measuring how many “likes,” shares, and re-posts a piece of content gets. Whichever one generated the most engagement is the one you choose for use in the real world to further target your audience.
Create Compelling Content that Will Pique Readers’ Interests
Targeting your content to things your readers care about is key in successfully managing social media. For example, online entertainment is a huge market for the 18 to 34 age group, who tend to view videos while on social media sites. This trend means you have to become deeply knowledgeable about hot topics in the culture today. Not only that, you have to be on top of the trends as they happen—or even before—so that you can be the leader of the pack to foster excitement around the latest video. Aside from the “cool” factor with your younger readers, you’re also creating an image of trust in your company as someone who knows what’s hot and what’s not. This works at any age level or demographic. Be there at the start to show readers what they want to see before they even know they want it!
By following these tips you’ll have much greater success reaching your target audience on whichever social media platforms they prefer. Don’t be afraid to focus on the big players, like Facebook and Twitter, as these are the most popular and will give you the most return on your investment.