Warren Knight
Finding your target market through social media can be difficult at times, especially if you don’t know the right tools to use to find them.
Before you can “find” your target customers online, you need to fully understand who they are. Who is interested in your product/service? What is their lifestyle like? Let’s take a closer look at each social network and how they can help you find your target customer.
LinkedIn is a B2B network so if you are a B2C company, it may be difficult to find your target customer. As a business, looking for channel partners (associations that have your target market) there are many ways you can find your target customer.
You will need to make sure your profile is at 100% complete so that people can find you through your job history, professional title, name and connections. To make yourself more visible, you should do the following;
- Anchor text in links
- Keywords in your job titles/descriptions
- Join groups that your target customers might be a part of
- Claim your vanity URL
- Ask for recommendations and endorse people who you have worked with
Twitter has been my preferred network to use when connecting with my target market. While Facebook works for some businesses, Twitter and LinkedIn are more powerful for me and what I want to share online.
Twitter’s search functionality will allow you to find your target market based on their location and the keywords (hashtags) they use in their tweets. You can use Twitterrel to find people talking about relevant topics, Twellow as a directory and Tweepz to find people near your location.
Twitter Analytics are being slowly rolled out to users and it will give you great insight into how your target marketing are connecting with your Twitter account.
Pinterest has only recently introduced an algorithm called Pinterest Smart Feed. This algorithm uses two main factors in determining a pins relevancy; pin quality and source quality.
When optimising your pinterest account, you need to have a unique url and have verified your website and added your other social media accounts. Include an “about” section of at least 200 characters, use keywords in your pins and always change the image link so that it directs it back to your website.
Hashtags are also a huge part of Pinterest. Finding your target market through the way they use hashtags can be done through Pinterest’s search functionality.
Finding your target customers on Facebook can be difficult, because of the new algorithm they have introduced. Businesses page likes are dropping because Facebook are removing inactive and fake accounts, as well as making it harder for businesses to reach their whole community on their Facebook profile.
One way to connect with your target customers is to use your email address, to connect and invite people you already know to like your Facebook page. You should also be using Facebook’s search functionality to filter results based on your keywords, and drill down on the people you are specifically looking to target.
There will be thousands of business pages, containing your target market that you can easily put your business in front of. Make this a part of your marketing strategy.
Video posts are driving more engagement than any other post on Facebook. Posting too much “spammy” comments are causing the drop in reach inside of Facebook. Know what your audience want to hear from you, and post at the times your audience is going to engage with you. You can find all of this out through Facebook’s insights.
Moving forward with finding your customers on social media, hashtags are extremely important when trying to discover new customers.
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