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Building and Knowing your Audience on Social Media

We catch up with Sian Ediss, Digital Marketing Manager at Pixel8 Ltd in the first of a series of blogs focused on making the most of social media.

Building and Knowing your Audience on Social Media

“93% of B2B marketers use social media; making it the most common B2B marketing tactic” Contentmarketinginstitute.com

Social media doesn’t have to be a time-consuming, laborious marketing task, but it does take a small commitment over a long period of time. After laying out which platforms are best for your business, setting up your channels with on-brand artwork, and looking at content to complement your activity, a key part of your social media marketing strategy is building and knowing your audience.

The key, so to speak, is conversation.

Here are some of my tips of the trade, which will help you to build your audience and find potential customers via social media. These tips are designed for a marathon, not a sprint and should be used as part of a long-term marketing strategy.

Captivate your audience: Create social content that drives interaction

Make it count. Just like a film trailer has just 2 minutes to capture the audience, your social media channels have a scroll through chance of grabbing the attention of your targets. Social media activity is the trailer to your business or product.

Here are my top 5 prerequisites for every piece of social content shared:

  1. It has to be authentic
  2. It has to be inspirational
  3. It has to be intelligent
  4. It has to be thought-provoking
  5. It has to be accurate

All of these goals are manageable, even with a small character count. As a brand you’re fighting for space, so you need to stand out from the noise. Take advantage of video, photos, graphics, artwork, animation, and ensure that Every.Single.Word.Counts.

“Social media content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.” Kissmetrics.com

Stalking can sometimes be a good thing

Uncovering your target audience is the starting point to building your social media strategy.

Before you start thinking about your social media key performance indicators (KPIs), you need to understand who you need to connect with to help you to achieve your objectives. Once you’ve done this, you need to identify where they are. This will help you to understand where you should be online.

For Twitter and Instagram, my favourite tool for finding your audience is Audiense (formerly SocialBro).

Audiense is a great piece of software to help you segment your audience and to uncover your customers based on location, age, activity, and interests. This is a great social listening tool which allows you to connect with the right people.

You might be tempted to follow anyone and everyone to boost your follower count - one word, don’t. Make every follow count, add your new connections to Twitter Lists for interaction and start getting to know your customers. Discover what makes them tick, what they’re interested in, and most importantly, talk to them.

When it comes to Facebook, Facebook Insights is your new best friend. The amount of customer demographic data on here is mind-blowing. Facebook has a wealth of information on its’ users, even down to their favourite lunch or holiday read. This is great for general demographic research and analysis, but where it gets really clever is when you apply advertising to this data and your brand messages can be seen by the right people at the right-time.

“In 2015, analysts predicted a 33.5 percent global increase on spending for social media ads.” emarketer.com

Social media advertising allows you to quantify the return on investment and see exactly how many targeted customers have seen and interacted with your brand’s messages.

Don’t be a Spambot - let your brand personality shine!

Giving that twinge of humanity in posts is so important to readers. It reminds them that there is actually a real life human being behind the screen.

Social scheduling is a must (no one’s that good to manage it manually all day, every day), but time also needs to be dedicated to encouraging conversation and talking with your audience.

If you go with a hard sell approach, you will be muted, unfollowed and left behind. Remember, the whole essence of social is to be social. Don’t forget to comment, retweet, share and like posts, and remember that social media works best a two-way street. Don’t be a virtual sandwich board.

Building and Knowing your Audience on Social Media

Captivate, listen, and connect - your manifesto for successful social media engagement.

  • Captivate your audience with exceptional content
  • Listen to your audience and discover what makes them tick
  • Connect and engage - build a relationship and make your brand and product unforgettable

These three steps to getting to know your audience are essential for any brand or business wanting to take advantage of social media platforms for marketing. But most importantly, you should build this into an ongoing strategy which takes months, even years, to build effectively to see the return on your social activity investment.


#DigiEveolution Twitter Chat

I supported the Hub with their Twitter chat on this very topic. We had 34 contributors to our discussion and in just 60 minutes there were 337 social engagements such as re-tweets, likes, and comments. The chat in itself is a great example of how to nurture and encourage conversation with your social audience. This is particularly useful for B2B brands who want to promote a channel for direct conversation with their target market.

You can find me on Twitter @foxcreativeart

Enjoyed this article? Here's Part 2 and Part 3 of the series.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the art of social media engagement and how other types of digital marketing can help you to grow your business, Enquire and Grow today. 

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Sian Ediss

Sian Ediss, Digital Marketing Manager, Pixel8 Ltd