Finding your hidden audience on social media

If you’re reading this post during the month of November, it’s likely that you found it through one of Hodges’ (or its employees’) social profiles. If you found it on Facebook or LinkedIn, the content either appeared organically through your newsfeed—because you’re an engaged fan or friend—or via a sponsored post—because we want you to become an engaged fan. If you’re on Twitter, you found the content organically (woohoo!) and you should comment below because we’d love to know when you saw this content in your feed.

While virality on the major social platforms isn’t totally extinct, it’s definitely in an endangered state…and quite frankly, who can blame the platforms? For the most part, they’re public and they have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money. Don’t get me wrong, as a lover of content, I’d certainly prefer that good things just naturally bubbled to the top…but the reality is that there is so much content living on The Interweb, that at this very moment in time, social advertising almost aids users in that it sifts through the bad stuff and connects them with things—essays, videos, podcasts, etc.—that actually matter.

Since businesses are funding this transaction—bringing good content to potential customers—I thought it might be helpful to walk through a few advertising products that brand page managers should without a doubt be utilizing to get their message in the right hands.

Custom Audience

If you are actively doing business, it’s fair to assume that you have customers and accompanying contact information for each. If you are looking for a way to communicate more frequently with those customers (because its more cost effective to retain an existing customer than to find a new one), then you may want to consider loading that information into Facebook or Twitter and developing a like/follower remarketing campaign to build your community.

You’ll just upload your list to the platform and the social network will identify which contacts are users. What you’ll find is that your cost per action is less than demographic or interest targeting because these individuals already are familiar with your product, and might even be advocates.

Lookalike Audience

Eventually, you will burn through your custom audience list—you’ll reach a maximum frequency and your cost per action will become exponentially higher. This will occur within a month or two, if your list is small (2k), and within a several months if your list is larger. At that point, you can upload an updated list from the same source (which is likely relatively small given the short timeframe), use a list from a new source (which can be expensive) or you can try and create a lookalike or model list.

Lookalike audiences are exclusive to Facebook. Here’s how they do it. Using their extensive database—which users populate each time they add content, he platform finds people who look and act like your customer list (demographically and by interest), but are not yet members of your community. You can create a lookalike of any custom list—customer, email, lead, website visitor—and what’s great is that unlike some of Facebook’s other custom audience products, it only takes a few hours to create.

Custom Website Audience

Do you have a mechanism to collect email addresses on your website? Say you do, but when you look at submissions and compare that number to total website traffic (which you can find on Google Analytics), you realize that you’re not capturing the majority of site visitors. Facebook and Twitter both offer cookie-like tools that allow you to place code on your site and track social users who visit. The platforms then compare traffic data with their own user information, and create a list to which you can encourage to join your social community, customer persona specific content and offers.

Once you’ve implanted the code on your website and the length of time a person should remain on this list after visiting your website (closer to 30 days if you have a lot of web traffic and up to 90 if you do not see large traffic numbers), the platform will begin building a list, which take between 2 days and 1 month depending on your website traffic. Once you have about 2,000 contacts, you should be ready to build creative and begin converting these visitors into a fan or follower and eventually a customer.

So what’s the point of all this? Why are we talking about this, and not the ad units themselves, or creative testing? Yes, that is important as well. But what we’ve noticed is that by placing a greater focus on the audience, and combining your assets with those of the social platform, social content is more efficient and more effective.

Want to build one of these campaigns for your business? Download a PowerPoint tutorial that walks you through the steps on Facebook.