I wish I could tell you that there are two or three surefire ways to find your audience on social media. But I’d be lying.
Like much of marketing, finding your audience on social media involves a lot of trial-and-error. You keep at it til you find something that works, and then you stick with it.
Your audience can include a wide range of people. For our purposes, let’s say your audience includes:
- Current customers
- Prospective customers
- Vendors
- Partners
All four of these groups can directly influence sales – and that’s why we’re doing social media marketing in the first place, right? To ultimately drive sales.
Now that we know who we’re looking for, here’s how to find your audience on social media:
Use social listening tools
Social listening is build into social media dashboards like Hootsuite, but you have other options to find out who is saying what about your brand. Three great options are:
SocialMention: Type in your name, choose a filter if you’d like (blogs, images), and hit search. You’ll get a list of mentions and pretty detailed statistics around sentiment, keywords, users, etc.
Mention: This is not free, but it’s very comprehensive. You can monitor mentions on all the big social media sites; receive specific, real-time keyword alerts; and even weed out the irrelevant stuff.
TalkWalker: TalkWalker is even more comprehensive than Mention. It lets you monitor social media mentions on all the big networks and on blogs, forums and online news sites. Also – not free.
Search hashtags
What are the keywords you want to be found for? Those are probably also used as hashtags on social media, so start searching on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest for those terms. See what people are saying. Follow the people who seem most relevant to your business.
Join groups
From Facebook Groups to meetup groups to LinkedIn Groups – there are tons of groups out there filled with people who want what you are selling. Let’s say you’re a residential plumber. You’d want to join groups filled with real estate agents, electricians, general contractors, home builders, architects, etc. All of them are not only potential referral sources, but they’re potential clients as well.
Search by location
If you own a local business, like our plumber does, you’ll want to filter by location. The easiest way to do this is on Twitter. Their search feature lets you filter by just about any criteria, such as location. So you could enter “real estate agents Temecula, CA.” Boom – now you have a list of people you want to reach.
Ask them
Already have a pretty decent list of customers? Use it. Send out a quick survey and ask people what their favorite social media network is and why. Or, ask each customer at checkout for one week. You’ll have enough data to at least know where to focus your social media marketing efforts.
What techniques do you use to find your audience on social media?
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Author information
Monika Jansen
Monika Jansen is a freelance copywriter and editor who helps with companies of all shapes on sizes kick their content up to the next level. You can find her online at www.jansencomm.com.