As you develop your presence on social media, you have to know your ideal prospects—who you would like to attract. If you aren’t aware of this, you will put out many pieces of content that may or may not attract the customers you want.
I am using Facebook for this article, but again, these strategies apply to all of the various social media platforms.
The challenge to building an audience at random is that you don’t know who is in that audience. When you use Facebook, you have the option of promoting your page and increasing your “likes.” If you choose this easy option, you will be charged $10, $20, $30, or more, and your “likes” will increase. The challenge is that you have no control over who likes your page. Facebook will show your page to people it thinks you will attract, and your page may attract them; however, if they aren’t interested in what you are doing, they won’t interact with you, and your messages will soon fall off their newsfeeds.
Building an untargeted audience, also affects how well your targeted advertising works on Facebook. If you don’t have your ideal customers or clients on your Facebook page, and you pay to target an ad to them, they won’t buy, they will also not share what you are offering with their friends.
The best thing you can do for your future success is to take the time to get to know your ideal customers and clients. This will ensure that everything you do in the future leads to increased success.
The secret to knowing your customers is to know them beyond the surface statistics. Yes, you need to know their age, gender, and income, but it is even more important to learn the results they secretly want. What do they dream to one day accomplish? How can your product or service get them to their goal?
At a seminar I attended a few months ago, I conversed with a person who wasn’t taking his Facebook audience development seriously. He had purchased “likes” in the past—and yes, you can do this cheaply. When he did this, he thought he wasn’t going to use his business Facebook page as anything to promote his business. He was just tantalizing his competitors with his massive lead-in page likes. When they get close, he just buys more. When I brought up some of the effective tactics that could be used to target all of those people with inexpensive offers and use them to grow his business, he told me what he had done. This means that to get the results that he should get, he will have to start over. His page is worthless to him for growing his business. He will have to delete it, start over, and honestly grow the page if he wants to use Facebook to grow his business. I would say that, currently, if he tried to target his followers, his Facebook advertising would fail.
The creation of an audience interested in your offering is the foundation for all of your future success in social media. Yes, you can use paid strategies to create this audience faster, but you need to know whom you are working to attract. The more time and effort you spend developing your audience, the more success you will have in the future.
For help in developing your audience contact Brian with Go Social Experts for a discovery call and see what it will take for you to get the results you want. Click Here to schedule the call.