Maybe you’ve just gotten into social media for your business and you need to know where to begin. Maybe you’ve been running social campaigns for a while but have yet to see any results. Either way, you need to become intimately familiar with your audience to better engage with them, and you need to have a game plan. Otherwise, your content is likely to be ignored – so why waste your time with posts that aren’t providing any value? Below are the steps you should take to make sure the content you are posting on your social pages is actually going to work for your business.
1) Research your audience
Think of social media as a conversation; what you know about who you’re talking to can lead to a better experience for both parties. You probably wouldn’t go up to a man and a woman holding hands and wearing wedding bands and ask if they’ve been on any good dates recently. Try to assess as much about your audience as possible. You can do this by using built-in analytics, like Facebook Insights, or if you have the time/manpower you can use some kind of reporting program to get the information for you. When you find out who is reading your content, you can better tailor it to interest them.
2) Find appropriate content
Now that you know your audience, try to appeal to their tastes. If your audience is mostly middle-aged women, tips on how to maintain your No-Shave-November beard are going to fall flat. It also helps to source content from a variety of places. If your audience sees you’re pulling from the same two sources over and over again, they’re likely to cut out the middle man and start following those two sites instead of you. It can be helpful to sign up for RSS feeds that fit your audience, or use apps like Zite or Flipboard which pull from all over the internet. You can read some other ideas on where to find content here.
3) Mix it up and experiment
Say you’ve found that your audience responds really well to recipes, so that’s all you post. It could very well be that it’s just food in general your audience likes, so why not branch into restaurant reviews, dinner party ideas, etc? You should try to branch out every once in a while because you simply never know what will be a hit. Play around with what kind of content you post – it could fizzle without much recognition, or your audience could love it and you’ve opened the door to a new subject you can post about.
4) Track your results
In order to really make sure what you’re doing is working, pay attention to your statistics. What is getting more likes/retweets/shares? Use these numbers to guide you – it’s safe to assume that the better the audience response, the better your content! You can use third party programs to monitor these reports, or you can simply look at the post/tweet/pin/etc. itself and see what kind of numbers it is generating. As long as you have these stats, you can see how you’re doing and get a better sense of where you’d like to be in order to set future goals for your social campaigns.
