If you are going to pursue a social media branding strategy, there are some fundamental insights that you need to have of your audience. If you get this wrong, or start creating content and running campaigns without understanding your target audience you are behind the ball from the get go. Put your company in a position of advantage by answering these key questions.
1. What are the demographics of your audience?
There are a few questions you need to answer about your audience’s demographics:
What age is your audience?
Is there a gender you should be targeting?
Is your audience clustered geographically?
Key Takeaway: You should create a digital profile of your customer at the very least understand their interests, age and gender profile.
2. What social media platforms does your audience most engage with?
It is important to understand the difference in social platforms – For example, Pinterest and Instagram are great for a business operating in the fashion industry, but these platforms don’t offer the same benefits for a company that specialises in Tax and Accounting Software.
Key Takeaway: You need to have a good understanding of what platforms your audience is most active on, more importantly, understand that not all social platforms are the same
– learn to leverage the correct mix of channels that maximises social engagement.
3. When is your audience the most active on social media?
Time of day is a critical component of every social strategy. If the content you are distributing is not when your audience is online, it will get lost in the feed – this results in low engagement and low overall reach.
Key Takeaway: By performing a time-of-day analysis on your different social platforms, you can easily increase overall engagement significantly simply by changing the time you distribute your content.
4. What content does your audience prefer?
Does your audience prefer to consume information through infographics?
Do they engage most with industry related articles?
Do Meme’s receive the highest engagement typically?
Understanding what content your customers prefer is important. It’s also important to note that different social channels leverage different content types – Twitter is predominately text based, Pinterest and Instagram both are suited to images and video.
Key Takeaway: These are some key questions that provide a lot of guidance into what type of content you should be creating. Obviously there needs to be some variety, however it’s important to prioritise content that your audience engages with the most, on each respected channel. There is a big difference between a simple status post, and a visually appealing infographic.
5. What type of connected device do they use (mobile, desktop, tablet or other)?
Is your product a high involvement purchase? Maybe your audience will predominately be using a desktop computer/laptop to research. On the other hand, maybe your brand building efforts are better suited to mobile devices, as your audience is engaging with your content on their commute to and from work.
Key Takeaway: Own, analyse and understand your actively engaged audiences across all devices to better deliver your content.
