Connecting with targeted audiences is the name of the game with social media. With all the social media channels available with millions of members, the biggest challenge for many businesses jumping onto the social media marketing bandwagon is how to connect and engage with targeted users.
While it’s always important to build awareness to reach a broad group of people on these social media channels, it’s also important to find people who are actually interested in your business and the people who can become your brand ambassadors. How are you going to target the right audience on the social web? Find below a couple of tips that can help you with this on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Facebook business pages
Facebook has recently made some updates to their system to ensure that Facebook business pages are better classified. You must have noticed, but the search on Facebook doesn’t work the same as searching does on Google. On Facebook, if you type in the word “swimming” in the search box, it will only pull relevant results with “swimming” in the name. If you are looking for a specific business page, use the Facebook page directory to search for relevant pages to what you are looking for.
On the Facebook page directory, you can also search for local businesses, brands, people, organization and setup country specific filters. By using the directory, you can use your Facebook profile or your existing business page to connect and engage with other business pages that are relevant to your business.
Twitter real-time search
While you can have a Twitter profile to help you connect to target audiences, it’s really not the only requirement. Use Twitter’s real-time search to get real-time updates on topics you are interested in. You don’t have to have a Twitter profile to use Twitter’s real-time search. If you type in the same search “swimming”, it will display the most recent tweets from people talking about “swimming” and you can filter this to display all the results or only the top results. There are also a couple of other tools such as SocialMention that you can use to filter out relevant updates regarding your search phrases.
You can also use Twitter chats to target specific people. This is very similar to using Twitter real-time search to search for targeted people and topics, you can also follow Twitter chat regarding certain topics and themes. One of the easiest ways to start with this is to look at what is currently trending on Twitter and joining in on the conversation.
For many people, LinkedIn is simply a digital resume. Did you know that LinkedIn has many features to help you connect with relevant and targeted people related to your industry? The easiest way to connect with people on this professional social network is through LinkedIn groups. If you search for “swimming”, it will show some of the most popular and biggest groups that you can join. The most active groups on LinkedIn features frequent discussions by members of the group. If you would like to target specific people on LinkedIn, use LinkedIn Answers where you can ask and answer relevant questions related to your industry.
One of the biggest problems for small businesses trying to use social media as part of their marketing strategy is keeping up with the changes that Facebook, in particular, keep introducing. Posts like this are always a big help to keep us on track. Thanks Anton.
Thanks Peter. That is the problem with only relying on on media channels that you don’t own. I encourage all my clients to use their “owned media” such as a blog to be the starting point for any social media campaign. That way if anything happens to the social media channel that you are using in your campaign, you can always refer back to your owned media.
Well said Anton, rented platforms are sometimes a nightmare. Look what happened to Woolworth’s Sth African business page this week. They had to shut it down. http://allafrica.com/stories/201209070478.html