social networks

Where is your online audience?

It is easy to say that your audience is online, but where online is your audience? Contrary to popular belief not everyone is on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and even if they are, is your audience engaging or do they just have an account for the sake of having one?  Where your audience is often depends on what your business is and who you are trying to reach; for example a plumber may not have as much success on Pinterest as say a florist because their audiences are not the same.

Before you Start

Before creating that Facebook page or Twitter account ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • Who is your ideal client or customer? Are your audience teenagers, post-secondary students, parents or seniors? Are they small business owners, contractors or teaching professionals? Ask yourself who will express the most interest in your product or service. Who do you want to reach? This will help you determine where your audience is “hanging out” online.
  • What kind of content best suits your audience?
  • Do you want to post pictures, video or text? When thinking about what kind of content you would like to post, it is not only important to consider what kind, but also your time constraints. Writing a sentence or two about your business takes a lot less time than creating videos about it, even though video may be more beneficial to your business’ overall marketing plan.

Where to Start

A quick Google search will result in a plethora of websites all claiming to know what social networks various audiences are using, but the best way to know for sure is to test a network yourself.  Start with one or two social networks and give yourself time to build up your audience by engaging and posting quality content.

Research

Every business has a competitor. Look them up online – what social networks are they on? Which ones are getting the most engagement? How are they drawing engagement – what is their main source of content, pictures, video or something else? Also look at their website, is there anything that differentiates them from competitors, including you?

How do you know what social networks to test?

Think about it. Is your business visually based, i.e. a florist, makeup artist, cake decorator or photographer? If so then you want to start with visually-based social networks such as Instagram and Pinterest where you can post images of your work.

If your business has to do with writing, editing, or bookkeeping you might want to look at conversational social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn where you can post tips, articles and advice. 

And if your business is more hands-on or instructional, such as a life coach, chef or nutritionist than you may not only want to look at places like Twitter and Facebook where you can start a conversation and give advice, but you might want to also create videos on YouTube, Instagram, Vine and also pin them to Pinterest.

There are no fool-proof guidelines as to what social network will work for your business. Sometimes what works for one business, will not work for another – even if they are the same kind of business.  Remember – your audience is not the same as my audience. While finding the right audience has always been challenging, it’s never been easier to build one, as long as you’re willing spend the time, be patient, keep track of the results, and be persistent.

How did you find your target audience? Leave us a comment and tell us how and where you’ve targeted your audience(s) and how well it’s worked for you.

Buzz and Brilliance: Week ending March 2

Over the week we go through a lot of content - news and blog posts, how tos and conceptual posts on the state of the internet.  Every Sunday we share some of our favourites with you.

Check out the links and let us know in the comments if you have any questions or if you read any great posts this week!

For this week and next, I’m on my own since Lara decided to take a much-deserved vacation.

Karen

Today, you’re going on a content adventure. We’re going to learn so much, from keeping content fresh (Spin Sucks), to finding content ideas when they seem to have dried up (SmartBlog on Social Media), to the art of repurposing content (Duct Tape Marketing) and beyond content marketing (Grow Blog) to the next steps.

Do you need a break now? That’s a lot, but I’m not done.

Related to content, it’s important to know when to stop using a social network (Hubspot). Joining or continuing with a social network for the sake of having a presence alone isn’t reason enough to keep going.

Your website is your business’ hub on the Internet. It’s your virtual front door and the place that will often give prospects their first impression of your business and you as a business owner. That’s why it’s important to make a really good first impression and avoid these web design mistakes (HubSpot).

Every now and then, I go to the TED website and just start browsing. I love watching TED talks. I’ve learned so much and been so inspired by the eloquent words of the speakers. Mitch Joel compiled a list of TED talks to help you re-imagine your business (Six Pixels of Separation) and I have seen a few, but I need to go through and watch them all again.

It came out this week that Facebook had a bug with insights and got our reach wrong for months and months. They fixed the bug and reach dramatically improved (Marketing Land). In other Facebook news, apparently all those text and photo updates may not benefit you the way you think they do (Jon Loomer Digital). Take the data with a grain of salt. Jon’s audience isn’t your audience. Also, I feel vindicated in my stance on the text updates.

We’ve all seen the Harlem Shake videos. It’s the meme of the moment. Personally, it’s run it’s course for me. One video was plenty. But this? This is brilliant. (Marketing Land). YouTube took something that was becoming very run-of-the-mill and made it interesting again.

The Media Mesh

If you missed reading the blog this week, you didn’t miss much. I’ve been very busy working on Social Capital Conference - oh, did you know our tickets went on sale this week? - but there is this one post about how I gained my Twitter following - I even included homework!

App of the Week

You’ll likely notice that our apps will have a business focus and not necessarily a social media focus. These apps help us stay organized so we have time to do social media. We’ve recently begun using a tool called Asana, which has become our task/project manager. It’s a lifesaver for us because all those tasks that used to go into emails and texts now get slotted into Asana. We can get reminders and set deadlines, which I happen to find valuable.

That’s it for this week. I hope you had a good one! Let us know what you’ve been reading in the comments.

10 Don'ts of Twitter Etiquette: How to engage without annoying

Officially, there aren't many rules on Twitter, but there are definitely a lot of best practices that can help you fit in to the community a little more easily. Think of it as Etiquette for Twitter.

Here are ten practices for savvy users to avoid (in no particular order):

  • Don't send automatic direct messages (DM) - people don't like them because they are impersonal.
  • Don't fill your feed with only broadcasts of your message - engage others. A good rule of thumb is that less than 1/3 of your feed should be new messages from you and the rest should be replies and retweets.
  • Don't call someone out for unfollowing you, most of the time it isn't personal. And often, there's a twitter bug. Politely ask if it's someone you regularly engage with, but don't make assumptions that it was intentional or that they will resume following.
  • If you're having a personal discussion with someone don't move their name to the middle or end of the tweet with every reply.  By keeping it as the first thing in the tweet only people who follow you both will see the tweets. Those who see both sides of the conversation can follow along (if they want) without losing the context of what's being said.
  • Don't reply to every tweet by retweeting (RT) and commenting. This breaks the thread of the conversation and it can be frustrating to your followers when there isn't enough context to understand what is happening with a RT.
  • Don't beg people to follow you. People will generally follow you back if you engage with them in some way. It would be far more meaningful if you replied to something they were talking about instead of simply asking them to follow you.
  • Contrary to what some experts believe, you don't have to follow back everyone who follows you. Twitter is about creating your own unique user experience.
  • Don't use Twitter to complain about every bad experience you have with businesses, services or products - social media isn't meant to be a place to air every grievance. It doesn't look good when a business owner uses it that way.
  • Don't autofeed from other social networks unless you're sure your tweets won't be cut off. People don't want to have to go elsewhere to see what you're talking about. More importantly, it is obvious when you're feeding from other services and it can give the impression that you can't be bothered to take the time to tailor your message to more than one social network (because it doesn't have to take that much time).
  • It isn't necessary to thank everyone who follows you. If you want to make a point of acknowledging them, go read their profile and start a conversation. Make it natural. The thank you is a nice gesture, but it isn't impolite to skip it. 

The most important things to remember are to be friendly, personable and add value. The practices above are "frowned upon" because they are perceived as not adding any great value. Spend your time finding other ways to connect so that followers stay actively engaged with you.

What other Twitter Don'ts would you add to this list?

Is "frictionless sharing" truly free of friction?

There's been a fair amount of talk in the last week about Facebook's new frictionless sharing experience and I wanted to cover that a bit more than I did in last week's Buzz and Brilliance. In Sunday's post, I summarized the recent flurry of controversy about frictionless sharing. We're about two months in to its use, so it's been enough time for users to adopt and annoy. Today I wanted to explore this issue in more detail. I'm starting with a detailed overview. There have been far more views expressed, but these are the five I happened to find first.

Quick Recap: The Players and Their Views

Molly Wood, CNET - How Facebook is ruining sharing:
"Sharing and recommendation shouldn't be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing--we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems."

Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb - Why Facebook's Seamless Sharing is Wrong:
"Violation of reasonable user expectations is a big part of the problem. When you click on a link - you expect to be taken to where the link says it's going to take you. There's something about the way that Facebook's Seamless Sharing is implemented that violates a fundamental contract between web publishers and their users. When you see a headline posted as news and you click on it, you expect to be taken to the news story referenced in the headline text - not to a page prompting you to install software in your online social network account."

Richard McManus, ReadWriteWeb - Facebook Hasn't Ruined Sharing, It's Just Re-Defined It:
"If you installed the Washington Post Facebook app and gave it permission to publish what you read, then everything that you read on Washington Post (while logged into Facebook) is announced in your Facebook news feed. For example, "Bob Bobson read [article on Washington Post]." But wait, you may argue, Bob didn't manually share anything. All he did was read it and Facebook shared it on his behalf. But Bob gave Facebook permission to do that, when he installed the Washington Post app. So, effectively, he did choose to "share" that article into his news feed.

So Facebook has re-defined sharing. It has cunningly merged sharing with archiving."

Scott Fulton, ReadWriteWeb - Facebook, "Sharing," and the Freedom to Opt Out:
"Up to now, I haven't felt the need to "share" with the world what I eat, where I walk, what I listen to or read, on what point of the Earth I stand or sit. It's nothing personal; as a journalist, I just seem to have this inner feeling that you don't actually care. One of the skills that comes with journalism is filtering out unimportant information. If I were to write an article about my music listening habits on a day-to-day basis ("On Monday starting at 11:28 a.m. I listened to Joe Bonamassa, followed by Chris Smither, then Diana Krall...") you would not stick around to read the complete list. You would rightly ask, what kind of conceited maniac shares everything short of his own bowel movements with the general public?"

Mathew Ingram, GigaOm - Why Facebook is (mostly) right about sharing:
"For me, what Facebook’s rollout of frictionless sharing highlights more than anything is that we need better filters to cope with the rising tide of information on social networks, and that includes Twitter and Google+. Google’s introduction of “circles” and Facebook’s addition of “smart lists” are a step in the right direction, but they are still too cumbersome, and require a lot of ongoing management (which many people likely just won’t do). Idealab founder Bill Gross introduced a “partial follow” model with his new social network Chime.in, where you can follow only certain topics that a person posts about, but that also requires a lot of up-front management."

What does it all mean?

This new model is a sign that sharing is shifting to a new dynamic and change always generates discussion, if not controversy. Molly Wood is famous for her resistance to new trends. Even the ones she claims to like aren't immune to heavy criticism once she sees the final implementation. It doesn't make me dismiss her views - they're valid and valuable. Facebook knew that there would be resistance to its frictionless sharing model. I have thus far refused to install any of the Open Graph apps because I know how annoyed I am by the very things Molly brings up in her article. I click on links expecting to see content, not an invitation to an app. When I can't see the content, I lose interest in it. That is a huge friction-filled barrier.

Richard McManus - as confusing as his take on this may be (Is he for this or against it? Oh, I see. He's just uncomfortable with it personally but doesn't like categorizing it as "ruining" or "wrong".) - makes essentially the same point that Molly does: sharing should be intentional, but that doesn't mean it isn't frictionless. Because, let's be honest, clicking a "like" button on a Web page really doesn't create friction, does it?

Ultimately, I think we have to accept this new mode of sharing. It isn't going away. It's too valuable for too many people, i.e., Facebook and the companies utilizing it. Which leaves users where? Well, you either opt-out, as Scott Fulton suggests - to keep your stream valuable and relevant, or you push for better filters. Mathew Ingram is right about that, but it still doesn't give us the happy medium that a lot of users will want. Copy/paste, as suggested by Molly, is clunky and time consuming. Filters are a bit better, but there's another option:

I'd like to see Open Graph apps give users the option to share seamlessly OR share at will - at the click of a button. I'd be far more inclined to use these apps if I could pick and choose what people see. Not because I have something to hide, but because I share items that I think are valuable. It's a recommendation or endorsement of the content. Frictionless sharing leaves a big question-mark in my audience's minds as to what my purpose is in reading that content. Is she endorsing it? Is she accidentally clicking on it? Does she actually think that's valuable? Right now, anything posted to my Facebook profile or pages is endorsed by me. I want to keep it that way, so Open Graph isn't something I'm ready to use just yet.

Just a couple of final notes: Molly says there's always Google+. We'll see. I wouldn't be making any bets that this won't ever happen over there. One last take on this issue that is interesting is Robert Scoble's. He thinks users are going to dictate a "freaky line" that they won't cross. The power of the community to influence networks is well-documented. And there is no shortage of opinions about how this should play out.

What are your thoughts? Have you installed any Open Graph apps or do you avoid them?

Image source: stock.xchng