Social Media: Knowing Your Audience To Know Your Channels

In our personal lives, social media has become a way for you to connect with your friends, family, and maybe even your co-workers.  It seems like every year we have another platform popping up and giving marketers and businesses a way to reach an audience, hopefully their audience.  Larger companies may dedicate a group of 10-15 people to run social media, meanwhile the small business owner is left to fend for himself or herself.  So what is the right strategy for your company or business? While those small mom and pop-type stores might stick with Facebook as their website and “marketing” strategy, I would suggest spreading your wings.  Cause if you think Facebook and YouTube are your best bets because they are most popular, think again.  Just because a site is popular doesn’t mean it is a good fit for your business (Patel, 2014).  However, a handful of platforms would help with your business objectives, especially since social networking is now the number 1 activity on the web (Merchant Money, 2014)! According to Neil Patel (2014), 86% of marketers stated that social media is important for their business and 89% of marketers stated that increased exposure was the number one benefit of social media marketing.

So how do you decide what networks you should create a company profile for? For those with limited resources, you want to select those that offer the best potential for reaching your ideal audience and broadcast the type of media you’ve decided is best suited for your company (Levy, 2013). The main idea is to not spread yourself too thin, but as a rule of thumb, have your presence on the “Big 4” sites:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Google+
4. LinkedIn (Lohana, 2014)

You should consider Pinterest and Instagram, depending on your target audience (Lohana, 2014).  Pinterest is one of the biggest drivers of web traffic and if your audience is there, then you should be also.  Just like creating objectives, strategies, and tactics for an integrated marketing campaign, Hootsuite recommends creating a mission statement by identifying a unique purpose for each.  The blanket statement looks like this: “We will use (social network) for (purpose of this social network) in order to help (business goal)” (Sorokina, 2014).

Here are some examples of what your business might create to understand how each of these main social networks might help your company reach its business objectives:

• Facebook – We will use Facebook for advertising to target a specific audience in order to help increase sales.
• Twitter – We will use Twitter for customer service in order to increase customer happiness and promote customer loyalty.
• LinkedIn – We will use LinkedIn for building our company’s professional network to help establish our brand as experts in the field.
• Instagram – We will use Instagram for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee happiness.
• Google+ - We will use Google+ for boosting SEO value of our online content to help increase visibility.
• Pinterest – We will use Pinterest for sharing high-quality images to help promote our products and increase sales. (Sorokina, 2014)

As you may or may not know, the subscription-model has become the latest rage in shopping for niche categories.  One of the best is Birchbox/ Birchbox Man, who is the leading discovering commerce platform.  They are redefininy the retail process by offering consumers a unique and personalized way to discover, learn about, and shop the best beauty, grooming, and lifestyle products on the market (Birchbox, n.d.).  Birchbox Man currently has 5 social media accounts that they operate daily.  These five networks are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.  Birchbox Man has a content platform they call, “The Guide.” Each month has its own theme, which coincides with the box that gets mailed out to your home.  The guide will feature in-depth product reviews, lifestyle articles, and how-to’s articles and videos.  All of the content from the Guide is published across their various social channels and gets them a lot of interaction from fans and followers of these channels.  To build excitement around each monthly box, they will publish a sneak peak video on YouTube, but the only way they post the video, is by getting enough likes on their Facebook and Instagram channels.  Once that number is hit, they publish the video and you get the chance to see what products will be in your box. It’s like getting to peak behind Santa’s curtain, before Christmas day.  Aside from the monthly box of five samples, Birchbox Man sells the full-size products in their shop.  Featured products are also featured on their social channels as well.  Birchbox as a company does a great job with highly visual images, which is key for engagement.  Almost everyday, Birchbox will change the URL section on Instagram for that product. 

Social media doesn’t have to be overly complicated, it just takes some pre-planning and then execution.  Once you know the networks your audience uses, you want to use an editorial content calendar to keep yourself on track.  Create content that your audience finds useful, helpful, and relevant to them.  As a rule of thumb, stick with the 80/20 rule, 80% sharing and helpful and 20% promotional. 

While your goal with social media should be gaining reach and awareness for your company, it should also be about building a community.  If you sell a product or service, it doesn’t end at the sale.  That should be the beginning of the customer lifecycle, not the end.  The brands who get it right, are the brands that admit fault and are quick to fix an issue, they are the brands that talk with their audience and not at their audience.  Social media is very much like the offline world, where tenacity and consistency are required qualities to see results in your social media efforts (Frances, 2014).  Brian Solis says to introduce value, insight, and direction with each engagement (2010).  As a model of effective communication, it is all the more important because it puts the personal into every transaction – and we all want to be treated like a person, and not just a “consumer” (of media or anything else), right (Novak, 2010)?

Let me leave you with this, your content should be what draws them in, but the conversation around your community should be what keeps them there.  Leverage your social channels to not only talk to, but listen to your consumers pain points.  This is your chance to help your customer go from Mario, to Super Mario! Listen, engage, and serve! 

References

Birchbox. (n.d.). What is Birchbox? Retrieved from http://birchbox.com/about

Frances, J. (2014, July 20). Choosing the right social media platform for your business. Retrieved from http://www.business2community.com/social-media/choosing-right-social-media-platform-business-0949951

Levy, S. (2013, December 2). How to choose the best social media platform for your business. Retrieved from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230020

Lohana, P. (2014, November 4). 6 social media marketing tools to make your management quick and easy [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/11/04/6-social-media-marketing-tools-to-make-your-management-quick-and-easy/

Merchant Money. (n.d.). Social media & business [Infographic]. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/choosing-most-effective-social-media-platform-your-business-infographic

Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/why-conversation-not-content-king

Patel, N. (2014, September 5). Which social media platforms are best suited for your business? [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/09/05/what-social-media-platforms-are-best-suited-for-your-business/

Solis, B. (2010, May 18). 21 Rules for social media engagement. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/rules-social-media-engagment/

Sorokina, O. (2014, November 3). Save time on social media: One social media profile, one mission [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://blog.hootsuite.com/the-purpose-of-each-social-media-profile/#pagetop