In this technology filled world there are a LOT of social media platforms available to users and marketers alike. How many platforms are you on right now? If you look at the numbers, the average person has SEVEN social media accounts. Yes, seven! Isn’t that crazy?! If you are running a business trying to be everywhere isn’t going to be effective. Where you need to be on social media is where your customers are hanging out.
If you attempt to be on every single platform marketing to every single person, you are going to burn out. Fast. There is no way around it, you just can’t possibly be on every single one of them and be effective. So what can you do?
3 Steps to figuring out where you need to be on social media
Figure out your ideal client, find your target audience, and focus on the platforms where they’re hanging out.
1. Your Ideal Client
The first step is to figure out who your ideal client is. For example, someone who has a lifestyle family blog is likely looking for people who are parents versus consumers who don’t have children and older consumers. Whereas a new makeup company might be looking for younger females in high school. Those two types of people are going to be on very different platforms of social media. It’s important to know WHO you are looking to get in front of before anything else.
2. Your Target Audience
(Please know that these examples are 100% made up and each of you is going to have a unique consumer and target audience.)
Once you have that information it’s time to write down your target audience. Who are the people that you are looking for and how can you categorize them? Going back to our examples; the marketer looking for families and mothers would likely try to target mothers, females between say 25 and 35 who are interested in things like maternity and household products. The marketer who is advertising makeup is going to go a different route and target females of a much younger age say 18-25 who are interested in exactly what they are selling- makeup.
Thanks to the massive amounts of unique algorithms that are now working across various platforms you can target specific audiences to see the ads that you’re running. You can literally pay to be right in front of ideal clients and potential buyers- only if you know who those people are.
Another great tool to use is the audience report in your Google Analytics. Inside your audience report is demographic information. Know the age, gender, and interest of your website visitors with the demographic report.
3. Focus on Platforms
The last step is to focus on the platforms where THOSE consumers are! We all know of the bigger social media sites. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, the list goes on and on. I don’t like telling people that something is impossible, but it’s literally impossible for you to be in all of those places without going crazy.
Let’s go back to our examples. The lifestyle blog targeting families is likely going to be on say Facebook and YouTube for sure. Moms are usually on Facebook and likely follow some YouTubers that relate to them as well. The makeup company targeting a younger audience is going to be on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat where that younger crowd is hanging out. However, both of these companies could be on a platform like Pinterest and be in front of their ideal consumers.
Tracking your social media links with UTMs can then help you measure how effective your marketing efforts are. UTMs are simply snippets of extra text added to your URL links. This extra information tells Google Analytics where your traffic is coming from. My favorite report for viewing where my users are coming from, engagement, and conversion by traffic source is the source/medium.
Key Takeaways – Where you need to be on social media
So our takeaway is that you need to know where your ideal target consumers are and be there instead of trying to be everywhere. Don’t burn yourself out by trying to be everywhere all of the time, focus on just a few, and do it well. For some, this will look like focusing on just two and for others, it might be four or five.
Pssst! You can also easily schedule posts on most sites as well as run ads across multiple platforms at once!
Want to better understand your marketing efforts – check out Datable’s Traffic Insights Dashboard.
