Targeting Your Social Media Efforts
Whether you like it or not social media has become a piece of the marketing puzzle and can be a great way to reach your target audience on a more personable level. But before you start making Facebook fan pages and YouTube channels, you should do some research on who and what people are looking for when they go to these sites.
A Look at The Numbers
A study done by Chitika, a full service online advertising network, has broken down the users of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Digg. They found that an overwhelming 47% of Twitter users go there to find news, while 51% of MySpace users are there for either video games or celebrity/entertainment purposes. Twenty-eight percent of Facebook users go there for the news, while Digg seemed to be distributed evenly between news, tech, and video games.
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These types of numbers are important to know where to target your social media efforts. Having a game plan is half the battle—for both offline and online marketing. It seems that many marketers are starting to realize that social media is important, they just don’t exactly know what to do with it yet.
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Another study conducted by Econsultancy and Bigmouthmedia concluded that 86% of the companies they surveyed said they wanted to allocate more money to social media, but not sure what to do with their findings once on these sites. Knowing why people are going to these networks can help with this.
Find Your Target
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Once you target your efforts and know exactly why your customers are going to these sites, the easier it will be to give the information they want. Since 47% of Twitter users are there for news, have your Twitter updates be more information based. Your tweets may not have to be all informational, but give the people what they want.
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If you apply your knowledge of traditional marketing strategies to social media you can be very successful. You wouldn’t run an advertisement for makeup on a channel predominantly watched by males—so why would you create a YouTube Channel if no one is interested there?
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Research is half the battle in marketing, the same goes for social media. It can be very beneficial for companies when used right, it just takes some planning and research first. Tackle it like you would other traditional marketing tactics and you should see some success.
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About the Author: Shannon Suetos is an expert writer on phone systems based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as VoIP Service at Resource Nation.
Photo Credit: Bogdan Suditu
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Nice article, I would also add the fact to start finding out what your audience needs and what kind of information they would like to receive. One part of that is to survey your audience and later using that info to create videos and other content in Social Media sites
This is really useful thanks and it’s great to see real statistics underpinning the points made. I am totally new to social media and have yet to develop a game plan for my own business, the points made here will certainly help.
It is all about finding a need and fulfilling it. The statistics you have are interesting and it has made me want to do a bit more research.
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this is very interesting “They found that an overwhelming 47% of Twitter users go there to find news”
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Hi Shannon, thats a wonderful piece. It reminds me that there are so many different ways to target social media efforts.
Another way to do it is to look at your current audience and their social media consumption patterns; then you make sure to have a presence in the places that you already know they spend time on. You could even take it a step further and segment your audience by social media platform and/or each segments buying patterns.
Thanks for a great piece!
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