Reaching your target audience on social networks takes time and effort, quality content and a thorough understanding of the medium. In the 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus study of online consumer. Employee advocacy is an alternative means of commanding social media influence. Employees are both the most credible sources on social media and the widest reaching channels (when put together). According to studies, employee advocacy can increase the reach of your content by as much as 561% and increase your engagement by about 7X. Your messaging is very important when it comes to reaching more social media users. Knowing your audience and creating content for them will help you hone in on the messaging and channels that will reach them. Provide value and encourage the followers you have to share your content with those who would also find value in your content. Reach Your Audience on Social Media Written by Jackie Hoegger How to reach your current and new customers on social media campaigns? From brand awareness to generating leads or producing conversions, social media advertising helps you reach the right people with the right message at the right time. You can reach your target audience more effectively by using targeted advertising. Whether it is Google ads or social media ads, they all provide advanced targeting options to help you reach your target audience. You can target the ads based on demographics, location, and interests of your audience.
- Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Examples
- Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Marketing
- Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Skills
There is an assumption that what you post on Social Media will be seen far and wide, however due to the role of algorithms this is no longer the case. A social media algorithm is a finite list of instructions that determines who, when and where the content you post gets seen. It performs by sorting posts in a users’ feed based on relevancy. It prioritizes the content a user sees in their feed by determining what it thinks the user actually wants to see, based on their browsing history and actions of engagement with other content.
This algorithm is making it more difficult for brands and agribusinesses to engage with their target market and the very reason why the role of paid social media is growing in importance. Only 7% of your audience will see your organic content, and with some platforms, this is set to decrease when you don’t run paid social campaigns. In essence, social media platforms are looking for you to put money behind paid content in return for them showing your hard-built audience your organic content. Therefore, if you are serious about using your social media platforms to drives sales, paid social is something you can no longer ignore.
The main benefit of implementing a paid social media campaign is that it provides you with an extremely effective way of measuring the return on advertising and enables you to put your business in front of the perfect audience; if constructed properly.
Defining your target audience online
Social media was once a platform where you could engage with your target market for free. Although a free element still remains, your social media strategy requires a paid plan in order for your message to reach the right audience. The caveat to this is that it is not as straight forward as hitting the ‘boost’ option on your posts. There are many considerations to take into account.
Defining and targeting a specific audience is the fundamental goal of your social media campaign. These should include, but not limited to:
- Location
- Interests
- Keywords
- Connections/followers
- Demographics
By clearly defining who and where your audience is, you can then think about interesting content that will increase engagement, and thus, increase your credibility with the social media platforms you are using.
According to the online learning platform, Smart Insights, social media is no longer just about conversation and content; it is now an established channel for customer acquisition, remarketing and engaging existing followers to support retention. Therefore, to ignore the scope of social media would be unwise.
Organic v Paid Social Media
Organic social media content is great for community management and engaging with your followers. However, paid campaigns can be used to reinforce your core message.
Developing a social media presence for agribusinesses can be daunting at first. It takes time to build a following and for posts to gain traction. This is where your paid strategy comes in, which boosts your online visibility, resulting in an increase in followers and engagement.
Tips for creating a paid social media campaign
- Set your objective – do you want to increase the number of followers, increase engagement or drive traffic to your website?
- Set your budget – how much are you willing to put behind this campaign? Think of this like any other print or digital campaign you would run.
- Create your target audience – who do you want to go to your website, engage with you online or follow you?
- Monitor – in order to ensure the success of your paid social campaign, you need to monitor this closely and make any adjustments as the campaign goes on.
To develop and execute your paid social media campaign, external help is available. Digital marketing professionals are equipped with the knowledge to create engaging paid social media campaigns and help you get in front of your perfect audience. For assistance, contact Green Acre Marketing on info@greenacremarketing.ie.
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How to Quickly Expand Your Target Social Media Audience
Author: Disha Dinesh
There are two distinctions your should worry about when trying to expand your audience on social media – the difference between a content strategy and a content marketing strategy, and how your content competition differs from your business competition.
Let me clarify each of these before we proceed. A content strategy doesn’t account for marketing and distribution without which your content will remain undiscovered. Yes, that viral video didn’t set itself on fire, it was lit and fed until it caught on. Second, giants whom you may have blind-sighted as business competition remain your competitors in content. Why should readers pick your articles over theirs? Answer this question and have a content distribution strategy in place before you proceed with this list of tactics.
Enable social plug-ins on your emails, blog posts and newsletters
Ideally, all media you use as part of your marketing strategy should be interconnected to create a web of traffic.
Your website, blog posts, emails and newsletters should have social sharing/following plug-ins enabled. You and your employees should include social plug-ins in your email sign-offs. That way, every website visitor or person you come in contact with via email could potentially follow you on social.
Your blog is also a great source of traffic for your social media pages. Your blog visitors should be able to share the posts/quotes they like to their social pages. Automatically picked tweets are good, because they simply the sharing process further and encourage more of your visitors to share, giving you an increased visibility.
Tool to use
SumoMe has social media plug-ins with a counter for your blog. The counter reflects the success of a post and pushes more people to share. Most email clients offer hyper-linking to add social links to your emails and newsletters.
Identify your sneezers and engage them in a content dispelling program
That’s what Seth Godin calls them, your sneezers. People who have the power to infect your specific niche, can be called your sneezers. How do you get access to and influence over a large audience instantly? You can’t. Even with influencer marketing you have to get on your influencers’ radars and then work at building relationships with them.
One sure fire-way of attracting the attention of influencers is by creating and sharing content that they’re interested in and are likely to pick up. Sometimes, simply doing that is enough to earn a wider visibility. To streamline the process and initiate actual influencer marketing programs, a good tool can help.
Tool to use
FollowerWonk is a great tool that focuses on identifying influencers you could connect with on Twitter. It works based on keywords and your location helping you locate the right influencers for your brand.
Organize your employees into an influential advocate army
Employee advocacy is an alternative means of commanding social media influence. Employees are both the most credible sources on social media and the widest reaching channels (when put together). According to studies, employee advocacy can increase the reach of your content by as much as 561% and increase your engagement by about 7X.
With employees, you already have existing work relationships to begin with. Most of your employees will appreciate being a part of something more than simply their work. All that’s necessary to initiate an advocacy program is their support and a tool to organize the efforts. Make you content accessible to employees and enable them to help you distribute it on social media.
Tool to use
With DrumUp employee advocacy platform you can share content with your employees with ease, and they can share it without much effort to their social media accounts. The leaderboard on the platform helps with keeping employee advocates motivated. If you want to track the success of your employee advocacy program, you can do it with the platform’s analytics.
Invade new content territories by re-purposing old content
Expand the reach your content has by converting pre-existing content into new formats. Not only does this increase the visibility of your content by introducing it on new platforms, but also helps you reach people who don’t consume one format or the other.
Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Examples
Convert a blog post into a SlideShare, an infographic, a podcast or video. You simply need to section the write-up, state takeaways under each subhead and type them in/represent them on new formats. Videos aren’t hard to create when they’re a simple slide-show or words and images rendered with the most basic animation. Every image or infographic that you create could turn into a pin for Pinterest.
Tool to use
To create an infographic you could use Venngage which has drag and drop modules that are easy to use. Google Slides are a great choice for making slides for SlideShare and PowToon has pre-made templates to help you animate a simple video.
Leverage the right hashtags and @mentions to help your target audience discover you
On social media, there are certain words that can give you access to large audiences – like hashtags and @mentions. Hashtags are used to index conversations so they can be found easily. By using relevant hashtags on your tweets, you give information seekers an opportunity to stumble upon your content. Have you noticed how Twitter suggests hashtags and related hashtags when you type a query in its search bar?
More than often, Twitteratti use those suggestions to find their content. By adding hashtags to your tweets you increase your discoverability. Using hashtags and @mentions you can increase the reach of your content marketing efforts on social media.
People love shout-outs on social media and it often encourages them to share your content. Tag and @mention them to include them in your promotion process.
Tool to use
Even though Twitter suggests hashtags, it doesn’t tell you how popular each of those suggestions are. You could however access that information through a hashtag analysis tool like Hahstagify.me. Based on the popularity of the hashtags and the influencers who are using them (both provided by the tool), decide on which hashtags to add to your posts.
Co-create & partner with industry experts and similar businesses for content
Building a large and engaged following is an indefinite and effort intensive process. Instead of waiting until you achieve that status on social media, you can connect with everyone you need even before you develop that following. How? By co-creating content with industry experts and social media influencers.
All you need to run this tactic is a good topic to work with or a good set of questions that your niche’s experts are likely to be interested in discussing. While reaching out to the experts is a time consuming task, it is worth the investment. Not only do you gain valuable insights to share with your audience, but you also initiate relationships with experts in the process, and enlist their support and influence in promoting the content that you co-create. Co-creation with anyone who has value to offer is a great idea. Even if your content partners don’t have larger following than you do, you still earn new insights and the possibility to reach a part of the target audience that you may have not connected with yet. The only necessity for this tactic is the target – ensure that your co-creators also work with the same target audience.
Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Marketing
Tool to use
A good social listening tool can help you identify people who are actively talking about topics that are of interest to your company. Brand24 lets you separate keyword search results by source – social media, blog posts, forums, news or even video. Using it makes it easier to find the right person for the content format you have in mind.
Image credit – Pixabay.com
Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Skills
Author Bio:Disha Dinesh is a social media and content marketing enthusiast who writes for Godot Media, a leading content creation firm.