Are your social media followers really your target?

There’s a tendency for marketers to celebrate the number of followers they have on their social media channels. But striving for follower growth usually isn’t an effective strategy to grow your business.

Sure, you need to grow your followers and subscriptions - but they must be the right kind of people, or you’re wasting your time. Getting them to read your content is the key to social media and marketing effectiveness.

How do you make sure your followers are your target? 

• Start by defining your target prospects. What are their browsing habits? Where do they tend to congregate online? For consumers, Facebook and Instagram are obvious choices. For businesspeople, LinkedIn and Twitter are the leading channels. Engage them there, and forget about the other social media channels – focus on one to start.
• Research your ideal prospects and identify their pain points and problems. What competitive, industry, technology and regulatory trends are affecting them? You may want to talk with current customers to learn what worries or concerns them. Sometimes their problems are not even related to your product or service, but are issues for which they still need a solution. One such problem today is finding good employees. In a tight labor market, everyone is seeking solutions to this vexing challenge.
• Create focused content that addresses those needs and problems. Your content will act like a magnet that will attract people who are looking for solutions to those challenges. In other words, they will self-select your valuable resources. That makes this an ideal target marketing tactic!

Feed your website

For best results, all of the updates you publish on your social media channels ought to point to specific pages on your website. There are several reasons why this works especially well:

• You don’t own the social media channels. They can and do change their rules of engagement any time they want, usually at the expense of marketers. You need to drive prospects to web properties that you own and control – such as your website.
• Most social media properties limit how much you can publish on their channels. In order to tell a more complete and compelling story, you must push them to your website, where you can publish what you want, in the format and length that you want.
• Once a prospect has arrived at your website, they have an opportunity to discover other related content– especially if you provide them with links pointing to it!

Take-away:  The idea is not to attract the most followers, it is to attract your targeted audience as your followers and engage them on your website.