9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 3 - Your Target Followers & Why They'd Choose YOU!

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 3 - Your Target Followers & Why They'd Choose YOU!

Defining Your Target Followers?

There are six traditional ways to identify your target audience.
1.     Where are they located geographically?
2.     How old are they?
3.     What sex are they?
4.     What is their marital status?
5.     Do they have specific interests? ie. Running, Fitness, Nature
6.     Income Level?

Knowing the above helps you choose which platforms to share your social messages on. There is an abundance of research available on what various demographic behaviours are on each Social Media platform. It is critically important that you do research to find out what social media platforms your target market is using! Using the graph on the left will get you started, it shows a great breakdown in the age demographics of social media users. You want to analyze who your target market is using these six traditional methods of identifying your target market. 

Why will they want to follow YOU? 

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One of the best practises when starting this stage is to ask your best clients, friends or suppliers why they would follow you online. What expertise, advice, experience, news, and knowledge can you bring to your posts that others can't? What is your added value when posting online? Answer the question: 

"What are the reasons your followers will want to read and share your posts?" 

Once you have your list of reasons to post, it is easy to look around your organization and see who already is on the ground with the most immediate access to that information. Then help them learn how to share it appropriately. 

For example if your business was going to be posting about upcoming events in a particular area, you could assign staff members to continuously research for events that are happening in the area, this would include news, events, notable actions in the community and any updates in the community. This is just a simple example of something that has huge potential. 

Choose Your Organization's Voice

The last element to this step is choosing a voice for the organization. You want to choose whether you want to be a formal voice, or informal voice. Which voice fits your organization the best? If you choose formal, than all of your pictures, videos and content must be formal to maintain consistency, and the same rule applies to being informal. Generally, informal posts that contain emotion get more engagement than formal posts that can often come off as cold. Equip your staff with WHAT to post, and which voice to use. Don't forget to link back to your website or blog when you can! 

Now that you have the tools to define your target followers, you also have to come up with your plan to have followers choose YOU! Try it out!