Home

Who is your audience? 5 Steps to Maximize Your Social Impact

When I sit down with small business owners to discuss their current business strategy, we always end up working down to one question: Who is your audience?  Social media is about popularity.  Everyone wants it.  So if you want to be heard, you have to choose who you are going to speak to.  These next steps 5 steps will help you make your decision.

1. Stop Marketing to Everyone – Popularity is Relative

Think back to high school.  The jocks were always the most popular.  Wait, were they?  Did the geeks care anything about what the jocks said?  Probably not.  In every social ring you see a prominent leader who is influential in the lives of everyone else in the group.

That leader is popular among his or her crowd, but popular to everyone?  Impossible.  Everyone is not going to follow you on twitter or like your fanpage.  It’s ok.  Accept it.  Stop trying to get everyone to listen to you.

Concentrate more on your existing customers by providing them with excellent service. If you feel that’s where your organization is lacking, read posts from Salesforce on how to develop challenging yet realistic customer service goals.

2. Realize Who You’re Talking To

You’ve probably seen tweets or statuses that have said, “Just renovated our new building!”  So what?  Do customers care?  Actually they might, if you’re a gymnastics company, a martial arts studio, or an athletic facility.  But if your customers never or rarely come in contact with your building then you’re clearly not talking to your customers.

To figure out who you’re taking to, ask yourself these questions:

  • Would employees care about what I’m saying?
  • Would sponsors care about that last tweet?
  • Would customers care about that last update?
  • Would my friends like how I phrased that?

If you said yes to a question then you have found your audience.  If most of the things you say don’t apply to your customer then you have to realize that you’re not talking to your customer.  More importantly, your customer is not listening to what you have to say.

3. Determine Who You Should Be Talking To

Make a list of who keeps you in business.  Customers shouldn’t be the only thing there.  And get specific.  This is just a sample:

  • Existing customers
  • Potential customers
  • Veteran Employees
  • Potential Employees
  • Sponsors?
  • Donors?

Now order it of most importance and go back to step 2 to figure out if you’re talking to the right people.  Whatever people you have in your #1 slot should find almost all of your tweets and updates relevant to their lives.

4. Be Beneficial

Facebook and Twitter users get hundreds of updates a day.  Make your posts beneficial to the lives of those who receive them.  That’s how you stand out.  If I am in your #1 slot, give me a reason to listen to you.

If you look at companies that do this really well, you see that they post a lot of relevant and interesting content for their audiences.  They become a resource and people recognize them as such.

Make people want to hear what you have to say by being beneficial to them.

5. Don’t Over Update

We all know what happens when someone starts talking too much.  Eventually you just stop listening.  Make updates often enough to keep your audience engaged, but don’t update so much that they get tired of having you show up on their feed.

This entry was posted in Small Business, Social Media by Pat Brown. Bookmark the permalink.

One thought on “Who is your audience? 5 Steps to Maximize Your Social Impact”

Leave a Reply