Know Thy Social Community Demographic

How to interact with your communities – and track marketing effectiveness

If you’re like most business owners or online marketing managers, you know that you need a presence in the social stratosphere: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn at minimum. But the lesser known specifics about how to determine appropriate interaction with the members of your individual online communities (and track self-promotional results) is rarely written about.

In other words, does the same messaging work for members of each of these social platforms?

The answer is a resounding “no”.

Contrary to popular belief, there are enormous differences between the purpose, functionality and (your company’s own) membership of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Even more important is the need for different, relevant messaging to your membership on each of these platforms.

As an analogy, let’s use a couple of well-known retail stores to further explain how crucial it is to know thy social community demographic. Shoppers at Target will generally fall into a different demographic makeup than shoppers of Neiman Marcus, for example. The advertising departments for these stores rely on demographic information (i.e. gender, age range, socio-economic status or HHI, education level, etc.) to ensure that messaging — in the form of which products they carry, special offers, sales, store-specific credit card offers (the list goes on…) — is relevant to their particular audience.

It’s no different in social media.

So, the obvious questions become: (1) How do I gain insight into the demographic makeup of each of my social media communities, and (2) How do I not only craft different versions of messaging that will be relevant to them – but track its effectiveness as well?

First, there are a few great social media software tools that allow you to gain an understanding as to who your audience is, from platform to platform. Recently, Liqui-Site announced its game-changer, called Social ROI.

Second, crafting relevant, targeted messaging is a bit of trial and error. That said, there are basics that great marketing teams follow based on experience, previous results, etc. It’s important to understand that creative copywriting is critical on a platform like Twitter, due to its 140 character limit. On Facebook, you have more freedom with character count, attachments of photos, videos and so on. Regardless of platform though, a link to a landing page on your website (if the post is self-promotional) is the #1 priority. Without that, there’s no way to track the effectiveness of your posts, tweets and messages.

That brings me to the second part of question #2. Web-based software programs like Social ROI allow business owners and online marketing managers to create campaigns, push different messaging to their individual social media presences, and then run a report on the results. Return on investment is then measured by taking your cost per campaign, cost per conversion and value of conversion – calculating it based on actions taken from those posts, tweets and messages by your community members, and reporting on the results.

Pretty sweet, huh? If you’re interested in learning more about our Social ROI Program, we’d be happy to answer any questions you may have. There’s even a no-obligation 30 day trial of the program. Post questions below or contact Liqui-Site Designs, Inc. at 855-WEB-PLUS.

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for a Prosperous New Year, from our family to yours!