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When Facebook was invented we all had the joy of becoming part of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for social media networks. We were swapping photos, stories and updates with people from all over the world. Businesses stood the most to gain from this type of medium as marketers jumped on board and found new ways to engage with their customer base. However, now there are a multitude of platforms from which to choose. This has left many business owners wondering where they should be focusing their time and money. Many have made the mistake of trying to jump on everything from Facebook to Periscope trying to remain front and center in the eyes of their customer base. Social media can be an awesome tool for generating brand awareness and customer support, but it does little good if you’re not doing the right things in the right places.
The good news is that with a little bit of research you can find out where your customers are hanging out on social media so that you can ensure the Return on Investment your marketing dollars deserve. We’ve put together a few ideas to help you get started.
- Talk to your Customers
Seems simple I know but this is one of the most overlooked areas missed in marketing. This can be as simple as asking customers you speak with on a regular basis to setting up a phone survey for those employees you having answering your phone for you. This also goes a long way to showing your clientele that you care and want to know more about their likes and dislikes. Don’t we all like to share with people what we like and what we don’t?
- Conduct an Anonymous Survey
Depending on the industry your business is in, it may not always be possible for you to have these types of conversations with your clients. In these instances you can send an anonymous survey to a paid audience to find out where they hang out on social media. Some great tools to help you make this happen include Google Forms, Survey Monkey, and Survey Gizmo. What’s more is that some of these have free versions available to help save you money!
- Use your Blog
If your business has a blog, and it should, this is another great free tool at your disposal to find out where your customers are coming from. Hopefully your blog has a share bar that will count your shares and which social media sites are getting the most shares of your work. For example, this share bar indicates that the majority of this businesses’ customers are sharing from LinkedIn and Twitter. Depending on the content your sharing these would be great avenues for this business to start posting on.
- Check your Competitors
People will sometimes forget to pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If you are one of these people, get in the habit of focusing on your competitors on a regular basis. You’ll want to see on which social media networks your competitor is getting the most traffic. There is a great tool called Buzzsumo that even has a free trial version that allows you to see where your competitors’ traffic is gravitating to, because there’s a pretty good chance that they will be a captive audience for your content as well. Buzzsumo will also allow you to do a keyword search of terms used most often in your industry. Plugging this in will give you a list of the most shared content for that keyword and how many shares it gets in each network thus telling you where your potential customers are spending most of their time.
Ultimately, choosing social media networks for your business to market on are not so much about your personal preference, what’s hot and new or what network your friends are on as much as it is the research you put into it that dictates where your industry spends most of its time. Once you’ve researched an gathered this information you’ll be able to post and market with the confidence needed to ensure a return on your investment.
What Social Media Networks do you join? I’d love to hear where you are most successful.