If you want to get the most out of your social media marketing you must understand your audience. Social media has evolved into far more than just an interesting site that people use to chat about their day to day lives. Many social media sites, like Facebook, have become virtual communities where friends interact, new friends are made, awareness campaigns occur, games are played, and much much more.
Business has been slow to recognize just how powerful social media is
Just recently have more businesses recognized there is a huge untapped market here with the potential to skyrocket their sales to a new level. By developing solid marketing strategies to use with social media you can also enjoy the benefits.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking if you build it they will come. That’s simply not the way it is. Too many businesses quickly throw up a website, start a blog, sign up to Twitter and start tweeting, and create a business page at Facebook, then they sit back in anticipation and are distraught when they reap no benefits, wondering what they did wrong.
Here’s what you need to do to enjoy successful social media marketing.
Create a Profile
Don’t create a profile for a single person. What you want to do is create a profile that is a representative character for thousands even millions of individuals that will connect to your business using social media channels.
What to Look For
If you want to understand your social media persona look to those who are already connected to you. To build a strong ask these three key questions.
• What are the content preferences of your customers?
• How do they discover content and then consume, and/or share that content?
• What are they looking to discuss on the social web?
Once you have the answers to these questions you can make smart decisions about what your content should be, and how to best present it.
How to Build Your Social Media Profile
There are all kinds of sites popping up who offer services to build your customer profile. If you want to undertake this project on your own, you need to keep these three powerful yet simple tools in mind when you want to find and develop your social media profile.
• Surveys – The main reason a business is unable to profile the visitors to their site is because they don’t take the time to interact with their visitors. The easiest way to interact with your visitors is to ask questions. Surveys are a great way to ask questions and get answers that can help.
• Web Analytics – Google analytics is one of the most popular analytical tools and best of all its completely free. It’s set up in a manner that makes it easy even for beginners. Any business that wants to be successful with their social media understands the profile and uses some type of web analytics.
• Rapleaf – There are other sites like this but Rapleaf is one of the popular choices. Its purpose is to see that every person that uses the internet have a meaningful experience. Here’s how it works. You send Rapleaf a list of all your email addresses for your users. Rapleaf then searches its database for that particular email address and then provides you with information about the person associated with that email address including age, gender, and location.
Source: Online Marketing 101