How and why you should connect with your audience – first case study

Connecting with your audience is perhaps the hardest, yet, most important part of your social media efforts. Let me give you an example on how to do that.

Connect with your audience, or else

Yes, I’m going to repeat this phrase quite a few times, since it really is a very important aspect of social media.
I’ll divide this article into three parts: The why, the how, and an example from one of my clients.

The WHY

Why you should connect with your audience is a no-brainer: Social media is a bidirectional channel, and believing that posting your ads continuously will not only ruin your social media reputation, but perhaps even your business.

Every B2C marketer should know that one of the most important steps in your social media strategy is to research and analyse the results of your efforts, see what worked, what didn’t, and veer your content towards what your target audience is actually talking about, interacting with and, generally, what’s currently trending.

B2B marketers, however, have it just a tad harder, since they need to research all that before even posting, knowing what your potential leads are looking for and how you should get in contact with them.

The HOW

There are 4 easy ways in which you can connect with your audience and find out what your audience is buzzing about:

Listen to the conversation by following trending hashtags or keywords on blogs, forums or social media channels like Twitter, for example, where tweets are openly visible to everybody.
Using tools like Google Trends and BuzzSumo which will help you find out what people are talking about, searching, or are generally interested in.
Spy on your followers by looking at what they post and what their interests are by using insights and analytics.
Ask them! Seriously, just ask them by posting questions, polls, or just seeing what they interact most with after posting.

The Example

One of my clients, who is a real-estate agency, had a really hard time liberating itself from the real-estate aggregation websites, that are very expensive and gave them absolutely no way to distinguish themselves from the competition, even though their services are much superior. What they did was create their own website, try to open a couple of social media business pages and hope for the best.

What they had already going for them was the fact that their business had history, clients knew them for a really long time, and potential clients from their area, usually stay in their area, so thanks to their already great service, their happy clients stayed with them.

The problem was that while some clients knew them, they still had the real-estate aggregation website giants to work against, so we had to come up with a strategy that helped show-off their excellent services, their impeccable style and create a reason to connect with them and not others.

The solution was really simple, actually: We already knew some of their clients, we knew what their clients liked about them, and we knew that their clients loved the part of the city they covered, since they liked sticking with it.

What we did was talk exactly about these issues

Facebook will cover all the communications with their clients, and will sport some behind-the-scenes footage, people liked.
Family photos would help connect with the human part of the agency (the proprietors are husband and wife).
Every once in a while, news about events and recent happenings would be posted on the page, so that potential clients could even learn about what’s going on in the area, before moving there.

Pinterest will have boards about historical and architectural facts and photographs about their area of coverage.
Since one of their services was interior design makeovers for the houses for sale, they would have tips and ideas for interior design and DIY projects.

Instagram can show both snaps from around the office, houses they’re currently working on and photos from construction sites.

The conclusion

There are a lot of ways you can connect with your audience, it’s really important, however, to choose the right ways, the right language, and the right channels, otherwise you might be wasting time and money.

Keep in mind:

• The why being interaction and fidelity.
• The how with research and analysis.
• The people you’re trying to reach and what you can give them.