Most business owners understand by now that it’s very important to have their company on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter in order to keep engagement going with your audience and utilize the power of social media. However, did you know that when you have followers on these platforms, you can learn a lot about who your customers are? And when you know exactly who your customers are, it’s much easier to market to them and earn their loyalty.
Shaping Your Marketing Through Data
For instance, knowing that your audience is mainly teenagers will help you in every part of your marketing: how to write copy, what sort of video content to create, what colors and fonts to use within your graphics, what kind of user experience you want your website to provide, and so on. But if your audience is, say, single moms in their 40s, your marketing efforts are going to be much different than they would be for teenagers. That’s why it’s so important to know who your audience truly is.
“The data that you can gather from your social media followers can prove to be extremely valuable,” says a digital marketer from the Alecan Internet Marketing Solutions team. “Even if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on paid social ads, you can get a lot of value from social media data collecting. A shocking amount of business owners don’t even know what type of followers they have.”
The Importance of Legitimate Followers
This is why it’s very important to never buy followers. Besides the fact that the social media platforms frown upon it, buying followers will also sabotage your data collecting. It’s very tempting to buy followers to make your accounts look well established, but just don’t do it. Instead, wait until you get about 100 legitimate followers, and then you can begin understanding your true customers, what they need, and how you can market to them.
Having fake followers basically just sabotages your data collection and makes you look very bad to the social media platform managers. They may even flag your account for having fake followers. Having even just 100 real customers is much better than having 5,000 fake ones—you’ll see.
How to Collect Social Media Data
You can collect social media data from who’s sharing, liking, and commenting on your posts, who’s clicking, and who’s mentioning your business. (You’ll need to develop a keen eye for bots.)
There are fantastic social media data collection tools such as Facebook Insights and Sprout Social, which will help you measure the success of every post and campaign. There are also incredible tools out there that will allow you to see important information such as age range, ethnicity, marital status, what their buying habits are, and so on.
Drive Them Home
“Each and every effort you make on social media as a business owner should give your audience a reason to head over to your website,” says the Alecan member. “That’s the main goal.”
Keep in mind: you don’t want to be spending more time, money, and energy on social media than it’s giving back to you. If your followers aren’t finding their way onto your website, then change something. Tweak your message until your social media followers do begin going to your website. Even if you’re starting off with just 100 followers, if they are true followers who are actually interested in your brand, that is the perfect place to start building customer loyalty and data.