How Often is too Often?

Getting the balance right on posts to social media assets is something every business wants.  You want to post often enough to be relevant and useful, but not so often that your followers unfollow you or mute your content.  But how do you know what the balance should be?

When you are first starting out, it will be quite difficult to gauge from your own social media assets what your approach should be.  There simply won't be enough data for you to make a good decision about your approach from your own followers.  However, you can do something:

Competitor Analysis

Have a look at other similar but more established business pages.  When are they posting?  How often are they posting?  What is the level of engagement from their followers?  From this you can determine when it might suit your audience to see your posts and how often people want to hear from you.

Ask your followers

Even if your fan base is small, you can ask a question and then see what the response is.  Ask something fun like "Are you seeing this post on a phone, tablet or laptop?"  or "How addicted to social media are you?  How often do you check per day?"  Post questions like this at various times in the day to see what the reach is like and how many people respond.  Answers to these questions will give you some insight into your potential customers while gauging overall interactions.

Be aware that while some businesses might flood newsfeeds with sales posts and calls to action, followers have the ability to mute or unfollow businesses that become a nuisance or upset the balance of business and fun on social media. 

Calendar and Schedule

Once you have determined a schedule of content that should work for your business, get gathering and scheduling those posts either on a calendar or directly into the asset if it allows that functionality.  On Facebook, for example, you can schedule for weeks in advance.  It means you then only need to add ad-hoc posts when you want to comment on current affairs that you couldn't account for.

Revisit

Every quarter, I recommend a revisit to your approach.  Make sure that what you are doing is actually yielding you the results you were after.  If it's not working, then look at your page statistics again and determine if there has been a shift in when people are online or engaging.  As your fan base grows, you will find this shift happens quite naturally, especially if your initial fan base was not made up entirely of your ideal customer.   Refocusing your efforts regularly means that you don't end up being left behind.

If you live in New Zealand and have need of Social Media Content Management for your business, visit www.kmedia.co.nz to see our offerings or contact us directly at info@kmedia.co.nz for pricing and more information. Follow us over at https://www.facebook.com/kmedialtdnz

Know Your Audience

If you know the artist, please contact me and I'll credit them here!

This morning the above image appeared in my newsfeed, shared by Telly Leung.  Telly is an amazing stage performer.  You can check out his work here.  As a performer, he knows the importance of his audience.  He gets instant feedback, which can be empowering or soul crushing depending on their engagement.

Social Media is a lot like that too.  The feedback we get from our audience is instant.  Sometimes we get a load of thumbs up, or 1+s or a string of retweets and favourites.  But there will be other times when you could swear you hear nothing but crickets chirping. So for those of us conducting business via social media assets, knowing our audience is basically the most important thing. 

After all, what is the goal of your business page?  It might be to gain more leads, or customer acquisition in general.  Even if your first goal is to increase your pool of followers, you are still looking to influence people to connect.  And the only way to get someone to connect, is to engage them.  Offer something they will enjoy, or that is relatable.  And once you have their interest, follow through with similar offerings.

There are a lot of statistics about this, but most experts agree that 70 - 80% of your social media engagement should be fun, engaging content while 20 - 30% should be promoting your product or service in some way.

So How Do You Know Who Your Audience Is?

There are a couple of ways of connecting to your customer base: 

1. Competitor Analysis

Think about the businesses that you are in competition with.  Pick a selection of the businesses that most closely match your business, and check our their social media assets.  What do you notice about their customers?  What type of content is getting good engagement from their followers?

2. Mind map

On a piece of paper do a mind map of your customer.   Ask yourself who that person is (age group, gender), what they are like, what they care about, and the sorts of things they like to do.  Once you have this list, think about the ways that customer will use your product or service and what they might want to know from you.

3. Talk directly to your customers

Find a group of customers who have already purchased from you and talk to them.  You can do this either online via your own social media asset, or in your business if you have a dedicated space.  Learn more about them by asking questions.  If you are doing this online you can use Surveymonkey or some other survey or polling tool.  Ask them to help with development of new products, if you are comfortable with that.  Your followers' can be a great source of market research.

4. Consider that you may have more than one type of customer

This is known as segments.  What it means is that you may have one or two main customer types who use or buy your product, and then a few other smaller groups.  They are all legitimate customers, but they may have different drivers for why they are buying your product.

Remember that people aren't buying your product to get the product.  They are buying it because it is going to contribute to their lives somehow.  Maybe it's the treat they will indulge in after a long week at work, or just one of the things they need on the hike they have been planning for months.  People choosing to like your business page have similar drivers.  There is something about your page that has appealed, and it's not always about your product or service.  It might be that they just really like the types of quotes or pictures you are sharing.  Through the growth of your relationship with the customer, you can then introduce them to what you do. 

Ultimately the niche that you are carving out, also has to be the niche your target customer base is interested in or you will struggle to get their buy-in.  While you can not hope to please all of the people all of the time, when you get to know your audience you have some hope of building a meaningful social media community that fulfills their needs and brings you more leads.



If you live in New Zealand and have need of Social Media Content Management for your business, visit www.kmedia.co.nz to see our offerings or contact us directly at info@kmedia.co.nz for pricing and more information.