You know who your potential clients are, so it’s just important to know where they are. Where are they spending their time? Who are they interacting with? What are they sharing? By knowing where your audience is spending the most time, you can plan and create different strategies and campaigns for each. As I mentioned in my last post, it’s important to write every post for the audience specific to each social media platform. Here are three ways to determine where your target audience is spending their days:

Social Listening

Social listening has been explained as a way to collect data on behavior and habits of current & potential clients. It is a great way to see where your target market is spending most of their time. In doing so, you can see who they’re interacting with and what they’re interested in sharing. By utilizing social listening, you can be sure you’re submerging your business with social strategy. Here are two quick ways to start social listening:

  • You’ve already determined your audience, now it’s time to find key influencers within your industry. Data from Meteor Solutions shows “shows that the type of friends, fans and followers a brand amasses on social media sites matters more than the number.”
    • Take a look at posts from your key influencers. Where are they most successful? What are the posting where? The engagement from these posts tells a lot about your target audience.
  • Use tools to help identify keywords and/or brand terms you’re looking for.
    • Sites like SocialMention.com or Topsy.com help you create searches that will scan the World Wide Web. It will grab information from websites, some social media platforms and even visual content.
    • Don’t just search your brand name. Consider doing a search query for keywords that are important to your business.
    • When you find a good mention, take a look at the shares/engagement. What social platform has the highest engagement numbers for that mention?

LinkedIn

We know that LinkedIn is the king of social selling. By utilizing LinkedIn as a prospecting tool, you can increase your sales. In fact, 78% of salespeople using social media are outselling their peers that aren’t. The platform claims to be the world’s largest audience of professionals (with over 300 million registered members). You may be wondering if your target audience is on LinkedIn. Is it the right platform for you to invest time into? Is your target audience on LinkedIn?  Here are a few quick ways to figure that out:

  • LinkedIn’s Advanced Search
    • Whether you’re looking for prospects or want to just scan what audiences are on LinkedIn, their Advanced Search tool is a good place to start.
    • With Advanced Search, you can locate people based on their location, industry, degree of connection, current company and more. It’s a great way to recognize if the audience you’re looking for is even on LinkedIn!
  • Scan LinkedIn Groups
    • Many that are active on LinkedIn look to connect with others within their same industry. The way they do this is within LinkedIn Groups. It’s where members ask questions, share information and get feedback from others. What a great way to see what your target audience is discussing!

Test & Track

Once you’ve done some research into the different platforms, it’s important to start measuring your efforts as you begin diving into your social media strategy. There are several ways you can test and track you efforts. Start here:

  • Campaign URLs allow you to track your own content.
    • Google has created a Campaign URL builder that you can use to create these links. Create a link that is unique for each platform you plan on sharing the piece of content (Facebook, Twitter, etc).
    • Once shared, you can track your campaign within your Google Analytics. Take some time to evaluate it. What types of content do better on what platform? What platform receives the most clicks overall? These pieces of data will allow you to recognize where your audience is digesting most of your content.
  • Split test your content.
    • A lot of factors go into making a post successful. It could depend on the length, type of visual content was posted and especially what time or day a post went live.
      • Test your content to know what length, type of content and time of day a post is going to be most appealing to your target audience.
    • Running multiple tests will allow you to gather a good sample size of results. From here, analyze what’s successful when and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Have you successfully found where your target audience is spending their time on social media? If so, which technique was most effective for you?