Social Media Content, Part 2: Expand Your Audience

Because the social media world is a tricky place (to be complicated by its fast pace), it's worth going over 'how to's' a few times. In the social media world, it is imperative to know your audience. The process of getting to know your audience is made exponentially more complex than it would otherwise be in real life if you were simply meeting someone face to face.  Social media allows anyone from anywhere to access overwhelming amounts of information about your business. This means that, unless you know what you're doing, it will not be immediately obvious who your audience is, or even what they are reading about you (since we all know by now that there is far more posted online about us - whoever we are - than merely what we post).

So, what can businesses do besides use social media to track certain kinds of conversations about their brand, business or service? First, those tracking services are only as helpful as what they are applied to, and it's sometimes impossible to know where likely "hang out" spots for people who are either already or could be interested in your business. Scouring the thousands of posts from the hundreds of social media outlets every day is impossible for any human; scanning the results from having a machine do that sort of thing for you may not be too much more manageable, so it can be useful to narrow it down a bit, if possible.

A study done earlier this year by the Nelson group confirmed what we all probably already suspect: Facebook is the most-used social media site, and Twitter is a (not so close) second.  Although Twitter's growth has seemed to plateau a bit since 2009, but Facebook's user base is global, over 12 million and growing. This suggests that businesses might want to put a good many of their efforts towards both their own Facebook profiles and messages, but towards "data sampling" from Facebook's (12 million) pages.

Facebook is also the top online brand as well, which is a bit surprising, considering how omnipresent Google has become, and how popular Mac products are these days. Despite Facebook's raging popularity, businesses would wish to do better in the coming year should be broadening social horizons.  While a lot of focused attention should be put towards a Facebook strategy, Yahoo, Youtube, and Wikipedia all made the top ten "most popular online brands" list.  For businesses, this means that, in this "branching out" to find new clientele, businesses could also begin to dabble in these other smaller-but-still-enormous social media sites.

Getting to know your audience in a social media world is difficult but crucial. Expanding your audience in the social media world is easier, if you know where to look.

Photo Credit:  Amy Porterfield