How to reach consumers when building an audience on social media
Building an audience on social media is about finding a clear balance between being overly promotional with your brand and connecting with your audience on an emotional level. Every status update, tweet and post needs to have value if you expect any sort of engagement. However, growing your fan base, reaching new potential customers, engaging with your audience and building a cult following on social media isn’t something that happens overnight.
So much of building an audience on social media is about being a good host. In social media, fans come first. If your business is a newcomer to the social media stratosphere, begin to build your presence by promoting yourself to the people who are already are aware of your business. Update social widgets on your website, buckle down on e-mail newsletter lists, send exclusive offers to new Facebook fans, even go native and put signs up in your store with the name of your Twitter handle. While these may seem like small or menial tasks, when building your social audience, it’s all about quality over quantity. Listen intently to the fans or followers who are talking about you on social and truly take care of your core audience. If they feel loved, they will spread the love. Give organic word-of-mouth a chance before diving into paid platforms.
Engagement is key for building any sort of audience on social media. The beauty about social media platforms is they provide an opportunity to truly get creative with your fans. Identify the most active people within your core audience and engage them by responding promptly to requests or questions and keep them up-to-date on exclusive news, updates or promotions from your business. Think of your audience as a community and take the opportunity to share with them the human side of your business. Begin relevant conversations in status updates, connect with influential followers, use hashtags: With more opportunities for fan engagement come opportunities for expansion.
As social media channels become more sophisticated, they provide the opportunity for businesses to pay to reach a very targeted audience of potential consumers. The biggest form of expansion for a business on social media is to consider investing in social advertising. Promoting your page and content on social to not only your targeted fans, but new prospective customers as well, is one of the smartest ways to build a highly specific audience. Facebook in particular makes it easy to create a variety of highly targeted ads that will reach your audience and those with precise and similar interests, including Facebook custom audiences. Additionally, you can choose the placement of your ad and create ads in bulk to save for later. When starting out, even putting $20 behind one Facebook post to see an increase in reach and engagement is a great way to reveal just how powerful social advertising can be.
Remember: building an audience is tough work. It takes endless hours, research and dedication to create the strongest possible social network. Think about who you’re targeting and where your customers spend their time on social. Remember that your target audience comprises humans who respond to visually attractive images, refreshing content and effective CTAs, with the occasional incentive. In the end, whether it’s 10 re-Tweets, 1,000 clicks to the website, two shares or a sweet shout out in a comment, it’s the community you create and maintain that matters the most.
About Yakkety Yak:
Yakkety Yak is a full-service content marketing company that produces custom written content for businesses, including blogs, website copy, case studies, newsletters, social media marketing, public relations and more. We want to be an extension of your marketing team to help you connect to end users and decision influencers, based on the principle of one common voice, for one target audience. Yakkety Yak helps you find the words you were looking for —so let’s YAK.