Finger Candy Friday: The Right People

by Jessica Northey

Last week we discussed “The Right Message" as it relates Social Media and the “Holy Trinity" of Advertising: getting the message you want, transmitted to the ideal audience and having it hit right when you want it.

Now we look at the "Right People": Who are they and how do we find them?



Part II: The Right People

Do you want to talk to Golfers in Tucson or Hunters in Wisconsin?
You know your business better than anyone else. By the time you take your Marketing efforts “Web 2.0″ you should have identified your target audience. Generally this is done at business plan design. You know what kind of service or product you sell.
Your choices about what Social Media Platform to participate in should logically follow where your customers and prospective customers are and how you want to interact with them. You can determine demographic, pyschographic and lifestyle data to determine what your customers’ interests are. You can target other company’s like yours or even your competitors Social Media usage.
Here’s how I view the various Social Media Networking sites:
LinkedIn: Work or industry event you have been invited to.
Facebook Personal Profile: Backyard BBQ.
MySpace: Going clubbing with the friends.
Blogging: Coffee shop talk.
Twitter: Happy Hour Networking Event Mixer.
You know who you want, now how do you find them?
Facebook, LinkedIn, your Website, your Blog are all limited to the people you bring to them, so it can be difficult to grow outside your existing network. This is why Twitter is such a great tool to increase traffic to other Social Media Platforms including your Blog, YouTube, Facebook Fan Page, MySpace or even LinkedIn. I even have clients who report increases of website traffic up to 5000% through Twitter efforts.
So, you are on Twitter, but how do you find the right people? Sifting through the overwhelming volume of content and services in order to connect with people you want to find can be over-whelming and frustrating. There are many tools and ways to find followers. I can like to show how I started my account.
This is what I did:
1. Sign up for the Twitter Directories http://wefollow.com/ and http://www.Twellow.com
2. Find People to Tweet with at http://search.twitter.com/
You can search to find people that you have things in common with, you will want to follow the people who are following them. These are people you have something in common with and they will most likely follow you back.
You can use the advanced feature to locate people of like interest and find out what people are saying about you, your brand, your industry etc. Both sites are free and great way for SEO and indexing as well as other Twitterers looking for you or your service and they help you “cut through the clutter.”
-Wefollow.com is a user powered twitter directory organized by interests that helps you find Twitter celebrities, actors, TV personalities, or new Twitter friends in your area.
-Twellow.com is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you.
3. Twitter itself has expanded its suggested users into about 20 categories and made those suggestions available to all users, not just new signups as well.
Next Question: What does your potential consumer know about you right now?
It’s too confusing to have a strategy that targets advocates AND people that have never heard of you. That would be two strategies, not one. You need to hold a mirror up to your target consumer and use words, phrases, suggestions that appeal to them. You need to really understand how your target consumer (as defined by gender, age, and geography) uses social media. If your audience skews older, you probably will not want to engage in a lot of “make a video” contests, since that segment indexes low on the “Create Media” scale.