How To Get New Targeted Audience On Social Media By Understanding And Listening To Them

As popular as they can be, social media networks have provided people the ability to voice their thoughts and opinions like never before. With them, people can express their feelings towards other people, brands - in short, anything and anyone.

What people say can be either good or bad, but that alone can't determine your social media campaign's success.

To know more about how your brand performs on social media networks, you need to listen and engage with social media posts that dictate how those people's opinions influence your online presence. This is called social media monitoring (or also known as social listening). This will allow you to get insight about your customers, competitors as well as influencers.

In order to take advantage of social media listening, you need to spread you focus across several social media networks, and to keep constant watch for new opportunities. The process indeed takes time, even if you use the right tools for the job.

Related: Growth Hack For Your Business On The Internet, And What Things Should Be Done

Researching Demographics, Making Audience Profiles

People's avatar

Every brand has a target market. In order to pinpoint your audience, you need to create a description of their profiles. The key here is to understand the demographics of your audience in each social media networks. With the data, you can create a marketing strategy towards those targeted demographics.

To make an in-depth audience profile, you need to as specific as possible. For example, if you want to target "men in their 30s", without other related information such as income levels, education levels, family relationships, career and others, it can be almost impossible for you to determine which social media network(s) are best for you.

With social listening tools and using your analytics software, you can group your audience by their age, gender, location, device and others. Coupling them with some other tools, you can also create more detailed report about their hobby, their psychographic profiles and more.

With the collected data, you can then gauge the topics in your industry, and pay attention to which networks are the most responsive to that trend.

Evaluation and Tracking Key Data

Analytics data

After launching your social media campaign, you must evaluate and track the analytics related to your campaign consistently. Such tracking is important and necessary to understand how your social media posts such as images, links, etc., are performing.

Each social media that leverage business marketing has their own analytics that have priceless data to be tracked. It's essential for you to know and keep track of them whenever the analysis become available. Below is an example of five popular social media networks with their key analytics:

  1. Facebook: fan-related metrics, likes, hashtags tracks, comments, shares, photo likes and shares, video plays, the number of times a link is clicked and positive feedback.
  2. Instagram: followers, likes, shares and hashtags tracks.
  3. Twitter: retweets, favorites, hashtag trackers, followers, replies and mentions.
  4. LinkedIn: connections, shares, likes, hashtags tracking, links, engagements and photo links.
  5. Pinterest: likes, repins, clicks and pinner followers.

Experimenting with Strategies

Social media strategy

There are lot of strategies that you can implement into your campaign, but not everything is plausible if concerning your audience.

For example, we've seen webinars as a strategy that has been proven excellent to garner new customers. Then we see videos that started to flourish when social media networks were starting to push video contents as their key content.

The point of your strategy is to know how to take advantage of short-tailed keywords with the ability to get a lot of traffic. You can also target long-tailed keywords in certain situations, but this way you need to be as clear as possible. Long-tailed keywords can get you more targeted traffic, but in lesser number.

Some popular strategies that can be used on more than one social media networks, include and not limited to the following:

  • Asking questions: you may have many followers but only a few of them are interacting with your brand. Ask them questions, and at many times, they will respond to it.
  • Interactive polls: this instant engagement can get you information about your followers' thoughts. The data can also be used for the effectiveness of your overall strategy.
  • Holding contests: contests with prizes can go viral on social media networks in no time.
  • Provide offerings: from deals, discounts to incentives - people like being spoiled with great products with good prices.
  • Linking to guest posts/friends. Sharing information is what social media is all about. This is effective in building your audience's trust.
  • Asking for suggestions: whether you want to create new products or services, you can ask your audience to know what they want. This can be difficult, but if you succeed, the result can be priceless.
  • Entertain your followers: people enjoy being entertained, so there is no reason that you don't please your audience. Post inspiring quotes, images and videos.
  • Use hashtags: you can create one, or you can piggyback on the already existing but popular hashtags.

The above strategies with the right tools can help you acquire new targeted customers from social media networks, and at the same time, giving you the ability to reach them where they want to be reached. But again, patience is the key to success. One size doesn't fit all, you just need to keep improvising by learning from the results.