For companies all over the world, effective use of social media sites can act as a gold mine for generating more business, amplifying customer loyalty and satisfaction, and increasing your bottom line.
However, not all social media strategies are created equal. Depending on your target demographic, the way you approach social media marketing will inevitably vary.
For firms whose target market is men between the ages of 18 and 30, for example, the following tips will help you identify where you should be focusing your social media efforts and how to communicate with your market most powerfully.
Get on the right social networks
Finding the places where your target market spends its time online is going to give you a leg up on firms who go for the shotgun approach. Admittedly, becoming highly active on social media takes time and effort, so you don't want to waste either by hanging out in places that won't give you a good ROI.
According to Neil Patel of Quicksprout, certain social media platforms have a proportionately larger male population, which makes them prime real estate for a company that's looking for more male customers. These platforms include Google +, where 68 percent of users are male, and YouTube, which reaches more people in this age group than any form of television,
According to Belle Beth Cooper at Fast Company. Platforms that you won't want to bother with when hunting for guys include Pinterest, where 69 percent of users are female.To identify the right social media platforms for your business, you need to know whether the type of customer you're looking for uses that type of social media on a regular basis. Depending on your business, whether its B2B or B2C, you are probably going to want to focus different amounts of effort on different areas.To find the best fit for your operations, do some demographic research on your own, using tools such as Google Analytics.
Don't spam your followers
Once you've found the right places to connect with your target audience, the last thing you want to do is alienate them into not following you, blocking you, or even reporting you. The fastest way to get this response from people who chose to follow you initially because they saw a need for your product or service in their life, is by spamming their feeds with advertisements, self-promotional material, or too many requests for interaction.
As a rule of thumb, Hootsuite advises businesses that employ social media to observe this checklist: thoughtfully set up your profiles, implement cross-promotion, create your own voice, provide valuable content, and share your story.
Use the right, high-quality images
Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner reminds us that, "as humans, we connect emotionally to images more than video, audio or text. People make decisions and take action quicker when promoted by images."
If you're running a business via social media, this is exactly what you want and how you want to focus your efforts, especially if your target audience is young men. An ever-growing amount of social media users are switching to more visually driven platforms, such as Instagram.
If you aren't featuring high-quality images on these types of platforms, your credibility will decline. For example, if you're in the men's fashion industry and the images you share are all blurry, take too long to load, or are obvious stock photos, then you're losing out on opportunities to connect with your target audience-opportunities you may never get back.
To ensure this doesn't happen to your firm, make promoting solid and unique images a priority.
Finding the perfect formula for social media success can be difficult, especially with platforms surfacing and gaining popularity on a weekly basis. But if you take the time to strategize your social media efforts well, and give your target market what they are truly looking for, you have a much greater chance of benefiting both customers and your company.