Influence and Mobilize Social Media Selectively For the Right Customers

There are a variety of factors that need to be considered when attempting to tweak your social media usage as an attractor for customers that fit your target demographic.  Each Social Media outlet (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.) provides its users with different services and therefore attracts specific kinds of traffic to their website.  The methods that they use are precisely the same ones that you can use to maximize your social media’s effectiveness.  By far the largest social media outlet, Facebook, receives an unbelievable amount of user traffic every day. Their users are from all over the world as well. 

(The image is by Alexander van Dijk [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Through the “friending” function on Facebook you can match your services to that of people that have already published their interests via status updates, related page likes, group affiliations, etc.  Facebook also offers analytics to assist in developing a picture of the kinds of people that visit your page, how long they stay, where and what they click on, and how many people were reached by your posts.  Most social media sites offer similar analytics to help with search engine optimization (SEO) which will assist you in reaching your target demographics. 

Almost all of the social media sites utilize Google Adwords, as both a revenue generator, from advertisement, etc. and, through the use of keyword software, targets users with advertisements that are related to any Google searches that they have made or websites that they may have visited recently.  A business page that has a strong SEO will be more widely shown to their target demographic, especially when paired with the utilization of carefully chosen Keywords.

It important to understand how to optimize your website/page.  However, it is much more important to understand how humans using the Internet actually surf and use world wide web.  To this end there are a few good tips to assist optimizing your customers experience with your services.  One rule of thumb is to keep the name and content of the website or social media page as straight forward and functional as possible.  Clear titles, informative sections, easy to access faqs, are all needed to assist your visitor to get the most from their experience.  Further, should you choose to have links leaving your page, they should be relevant and the sites that they go to trustworthy.  Users that pick up a virus or find a nasty surprise in a link are likely to remember and avoid whatever page they believe that they got that bad experience from.

The last part that we will cover is finding out what the online equivalent of recommendations works for customers.  They will talk to each other and tell each other about good sites or bad.  Bloggers that make it their business to explore the internet for good sites will inform curious people.  So, too, will important events or people impact the search behaviors of users.  Google has analytics that can tell you what kinds of keywords or searches are currently spiking, allowing you to use keywords to help funnel your demographic to your page.  A carefully created and maintain website or social media page could be a gold mine if it is properly calibrated and stays responsive to the moods and habits of potential customers.

Other Interesting Blog Posts on Social Media:

• Social Media Privacy http://inbound.business.wayne.edu/blog/social-media-privacy
• Choose Your Battle Wisely: Which Social Media Platform to Engage? http://inbound.business.wayne.edu/blog/choose-your-battle-wisely-which-social-media-platform-to-engage
• Social Media Marketinginbound.business.wayne.edu/blog/social-media-through-the-consumers-mind

(All accolades and credit for this tremendous blog post are for Kalvin Shunia who is the author and content creator.)