Get to know your audience – Social media marketing

The key to a successful social media campaign, is getting to know your audience in order to give them what they need. Understanding your audience includes aspects like demographics, online behaviour and geographic information to name a few. Social media is about building relationships with your online audience. Just like in real life, building a relationship takes spending some time, and getting to know the person. Once you know WHO you are writing for, it will help you to formulate a social media strategy that communicates directly to your audience, telling them what they want to hear from you.

There are a few simple ways to get to know your audience, and it doesn’t have to be very time consuming. A broad overview will do.

• Tools: There are many free and paid tools that you can use to get to know your audience’s demographics. One free tool you can use if you are using Facebook for your business, is the Facebook insights. Here you will find information about your Facebook audience including age, gender and cities they are from. Other third party tools can even give you information such as popular posting times of your followers.

Use Facebook insights to learn more about your audience

• Listen: Another tactic is keeping your ear to the ground to find out what people are saying related to your industry, or what the current buzz is. By listening to what your community is saying, you can connect with them much easier.
• Surveys / Questions: Asking questions or doing surveys on social media platforms is an easy way to get to know your audience’s tastes and how they think. People are always eager to give their opinion if they have a choice to do so! You can also entice them to participate by making this part of a competition with a prize.

Develop your target market

Once you have collected a sufficient amount of information that you can use, develop your target market/s accordingly. This will be of great help when working on your social media strategy. You will probably end up with more than one target market, making sure you don’t exclude your important followers. The important thing is to be specific. E.g. Target market 1: Women aged 35-45 in Johannesburg region, who are physically active and health conscious.

Once you have this information, you are able to supply your audience with information that they deem valuable, inspiring them to connect with you. Just remember that engaging with your audience is key when it comes to social media marketing. Talk to them, reply to their questions, and give them solutions to their needs.