Business Insight Zone

That might be Rule #1 for marketing via social media.

One night at dinner during the vacation I just finished, I was talking to a relative about how her organization might use social media. She’s on Facebook for her personal use, but doesn’t blog and doesn’t use Twitter or LinkedIn. Neither, I take it, do any of the other people in her outfit, including those with formal marketing duties.

For at least a few more years, it’s true that some groups won’t need to lay out a social media strategy, even informally. But my relative’s nonprofit is trying to reach out to a younger audience — people in their 30s and 40s — so it behooves them to put their feet in the water of social media, at a minimum.

My summary advice to her: Fish where the fish are.

This is hardly an original idea on my part: it’s been discussed by Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Darren Rowse, and many other business thinkers who are studying social media’s deployment for marketing, and who are using social media themselves as a marketing vehicle (or, more accurately, set of marketing vehicles, since “social media” encompasses more than one thing).

The Guiding Principle

So if you’re contemplating using social media for your organization, profit or nonprofit, consider this fundamental question:

Where is my audience already congregating online?

At the conceptual level, this is no different from deciding how you could market your outfit in the offline world. Before you pay the substantial fees to have a vendor’s booth at, say, South by Southwest Interactive or the Direct Marketing Association or the Special Libraries Association, it pays to figure out whether enough of your audience will be congregating at those events.

Similarly, you wouldn’t pay good money to advertise in Esquire or GQ if you’re selling tampons. The basic point prevails regardless of the type of medium you want to use: You need to pick the right venue if you want to put your best foot forward with your best audiences.

Questions to Ask Yourself

What does that mean, in practical terms, if you want to take first steps in social media for your business or group? I’d start with a set of questions like these:

• Which audience(s) do we want to target?
• Does our audience read blogs? Which ones? Do they comment? What do they say?
• Does our audience participate in online forums? Are these Facebook groups, LinkedIn Q&A’s, bulletin boards, specialty forums, what?
• Is (enough of) our audience active on Facebook — personally, professionally, or both?
• Is (enough of) our audience active on LinkedIn?
• Is (enough of) our audience active on Twitter?
• Is (enough of) our audience active on social content-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr?
• Where else is (enough of) our audience active online?

Pay special attention to that YouTube/Flickr question, because it’s possible that you’ll be better served establishing a presence there than on one of the main social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter). For example, if I were running a skateboard shop, I would make it a priority to set up a YouTube channel (it’s free to do) that showcased some of the best video of my customers skating on my boards. If I were running an art museum, I would set up a Flickr account that allowed me to share (within copyright limits) photos of the art in the museum, or of the eager crowds at exhibition openings.

Copy What Works

For more ideas on where to find your audience, take a look at what your peer organizations are doing in social media. Maybe there are a lot of skateboard shops with YouTube channels. Maybe there are lots of museums using Flickr or Facebook to share pictures. Maybe your competitors are making hay on LinkedIn, or by using Twitter, or by blogging effectively. Whatever the case, you can learn from both the successes and failures of your peers, before you overcommit resources to a channel that might not be fruitful for helping you achieve your goals.

Once you understand where the fish are, you can start fishing there. How to fish for them is a topic for another post.

Are you fishing where the fish are?

~

Photo by Kasper Sorensen.

Category: Marketing & Sales,Social media