Why Social Media is Less about You & More about Your Audience

How to Make Your Social Media about Your Customers

If you wish Richie McCaw was your brother, you probably follow him and other rugby-related pages on Facebook. If you’re a big fan of Ariana Grande, you might have subscribed to her Snapchat account. If for some reason you can’t get enough of pimple popping videos, you might follow Dr Pimple Popper on Instagram. Urgh.

When consumers use social media, they follow people, brands and businesses they like. Friends and people they actually know probably rank at the top of their friends list. If the consumer is a mum, they might follow kid-friendly accounts like clothing, ‘mumspiration’ or mummy bloggers. If the consumer is sports mad or really into business, they might follow the teams and brands they admire the most.

Businesses & Social Media

Lots of businesses think that getting into social media means that their pages and accounts are all about their brand. In fact, a social media account has less to do with a business and more to do with the people the business is trying to attract.

Knowing that consumers only follow the stuff that they’re interested in, it’s imperative that when businesses get into social media, they figure out who their target audience is and create content that will appeal to them.

Crafting a creative social media strategy is the key to getting traction on social media. A great social media strategy puts the target audience at the centre of every post. It identifies a handful of key points from the business that it wants to convey, then crafts messaging that will appeal to that target audience. And it incorporates lots of different creative elements to do so, including video, blogs, images and live video.

Already-Awesome Brands on Social

Brands that already have a name for themselves can’t afford to sit on their laurels when it comes to creating a solid social media strategy. If a brand like the All Blacks or Coke wants to be successful on social, they need to constantly refine their strategy and come up with ideas that will keep their audience engaged.

Social Media for Nobodies

For brands that don’t have much of a following, the same is weirdly true. If you’re a business looking for traction on social media, a solid strategy is essential to help you get one step – hopefully more steps – ahead of your competitors. Use your competitors as inspiration, not to find ideas about what to do but ideas about what not to do. You need to create a point of difference between you and other similar businesses.

How to Be Different When Everyone’s Doing the Same Thing on Social

If you’re relatively new to social, or you’ve been around a while but you’re keen to reinvent your social identity, it can be overwhelming to establish the right route to go down. If we’re being honest, there isn’t really a ‘right’ way to do social. The beauty of social media is that you can test and test and test again until you find a solution that works for you and your business.

Putting your audience at the centre of every decision you make is the key. For example, if you produce eco-friendly glad wrap alternatives, your target audience is probably a housewife (perhaps a mum) who wants to do her bit to contribute to the environment. You probably wouldn’t create content that was targeted to a businessman; you’d focus more on happy kids, a happy family life, clean and green environments and interesting messaging that appeals to a mum who cares about the health of her family and the environment.

If you produce work boots for construction sites and have always found it relatively easy to sell them until recently, perhaps you could think about changing up your target audience on social media. Keeping in mind that most social media users are in younger demographics, you could create a campaign that targets apprentices or young builders, for example. These people are more likely to be male, typically ‘blokey’ and be interested in things like sport and beer. Mixing your messaging with ideas that appeal to your audience could be a successful social media strategy.

Of course, being too generic and cliché might backfire so always tread carefully if you’re making generalisations about a certain ‘type’ of person.

Doing Social Media Well

Succeeding at social media is an art. If you feel out of your depth, talking to a specialist social media digital marketing company like Onepost is a great place to start. We are experts in producing video for social media that drives engagement and gives businesses like yours tangible results. Find out how we can transform your social media results through the power of video today.