Page 139 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

To pick the right platforms, you can start by looking at the audiences with which
you interact, and at where they are most likely to make their purchasing decisions.
For purposes of this discussion, you can break your audiences down into the
following three groups:

» Customers: Obviously, this is your main target. You want to connect, interact,
and prompt them to buy from you. You need to understand why they buy,
where they buy, and what influences their purchasing process.
» Industry: These are the people who may be competitors, vendors, governing
bodies, and so on. In the social media world, this group helps to support your
visibility and influence with media outlets and customers directly.
» Employees: They can be either your greatest strength or weakness, depend-
ing on how you prepare them to participate in social media. If you don’t have
staff to dedicate to a project, you have a different kind of problem to solve.

Following is a look at how to work through the issues of picking platforms that
support each group.

Learning about your customers

Choose where to practice SMM by researching and understanding where your cus-
tomers are spending most of their time. This doesn’t mean identifying where
most of your customers have registered profiles, but instead researching where
the customers have the highest levels of engagement. This means

» Finding out what amount of time they spend on the social platform,
what they specifically do, and how they use it to interact with
each other.
Tools such as Quantcast (www.quantcast.com) can help you understand
engagement, but you may need to reach out to the social platforms them-
selves to understand the details of the engagement. Keep in mind that with
Quantcast, only if the site has been Quantified (which means that the site
owner has added Quantcast code to his site) are the statistics the most
accurate. Comscore (www.comscore.com) is a paid solution that can provide
more accurate numbers for non-Quantified sites. Figure 7-1 shows the
Quantcast home page.
You may also want to survey your customers directly to understand their
social media usage. There are several good survey tools, including
SurveyMonkey and Zoho Survey.

CHAPTER 7 Finding the Right Platforms 123