Defining Your Social Media Audience

Using social media to drive business results is a different exercise than playing around on your personal social pages (insert posting-what-you’re-having-for-breakfast joke here). Your goals will change from connecting with friends to systematically defining your social media audience and tailoring your posts to educate, advise and help them.

Your goal now is to earn the trust of potential leads who are searching for solutions from an industry expert like you. Sharing your expertise through social channels will result in new relationships with prospects.

Unlike your personal use of social media, your business use should be backed with a sound strategy. A social media strategy will help you define your goals (a certain number of new leads over a certain time frame, for example), stay on budget, target your audience effectively considering the different social platforms, and calculate your return on investment.

Who are You Helping?

Defining who you are helping with your social media posts is foundational to a successful strategy. What are your buyer personas, and how do you create them?

Don’t rely on educated guesses about who your customers are, or create content based on who you want your customer to be. Research who they are.

Dial in Your Strategy

You can start by learning more about existing customers. Think about the questions they ask you and study any data you have about their demographics, motivations, and interests.

You can use services like Survey Monkey to reach out to your existing contacts and ask them about the things you want to know.

With solid information about your customers, the next step is to distill it into a written description that you can refer back to. These “buyer personas” will sustain your social media campaign over time and ensure your posts are purposeful.

Multiple Personalities

Your research may indicate your customers are more diverse than one buyer persona can capture. Many businesses develop multiple buyer personas. Doing so will change your social media approach. Check out HubSpot’s convenient Make My Persona tool to easily and quickly create detailed buyer personas based on information you have already collected about your audience.

Perhaps one buyer persona you’ve written describes an executive at a corporation with whom you have done business in the past. She uses LinkedIn to follow competitors and connect with professional peers. Craft a series of relevant LinkedIn posts to reach out to this persona.

Another buyer persona may describe a young, urban student with no use for LinkedIn but who is very active on Instagram. Optimizing your post for visual impact and hashtags is a good way to speak to this persona.

Tailor each post to a specific persona instead of trying to reach multiple personas with one post.

Buying Is a Journey

Another component of your audience you should become familiar with is where they are in the buyer’s journey. They buyer’s journey outlines the stages people go through when deciding to make a purchase.

Not everyone who sees your social media posts will be ready to buy, so some of your posts should speak to people who will make a decision in the future. The three stages of the buyer’s journey are:

• Awareness: People who have identified a problem or opportunity but haven’t decided whether they are going to buy anything to address it.
• Consideration: People who have clearly defined their challenge or goal and are evaluating different ways to address it.
• Decision: People who have decided how they will address their issue or goal but haven’t yet made a purchase.

Crafting content specifically to each stage of the buyer’s journey will help to support and engage consumers no matter where they are in the cycle. This information should help to guide their decision-making process without overselling your product or service; it should be a objectively informative, while still increasing brand awareness to keep you front-of-mind of consumers who engage with your content.