Social media for businesses can be scary, there’s a whole world out there you didn’t know about, hidden away in the corners of the internet. It can prove to be a vital tool for many reasons, including bringing in traffic and sales, that will benefit your business a great deal. When you approach a social media agency, it’s good to have an understanding of what you want social media to do for your business. In this post we’ll be outlining most of them, so you’ll be prepared for when someone pops the big question to you, “Do you want social media to help your business grow?”.

“Who is your target audience?”

Let’s start off here, arguably the most important topic on our list. Knowing your target audience and demographic is huge, it makes sure the content is being tailored to suit the audience and also ensures your posts are not reaching people who will not engage with them. 

For example, it’s like sending and receiving promotional mail. People don’t want to spend and communicate with offers for businesses that they have no interest in. (Likewise, they don’t want to be spammed!). Picking out the correct target audience is important and it helps make other goals and targets down the line easier. Some businesses already know who their audience is, take Mary as an example.

Mary owns a funky, colourful, modern American diner-style restaurant in East London, her target audience is primarily families, teens and young adults. She knows this because that’s who mostly come to dine at the restaurant and who is engaging with her business, tagging the restaurant on photos on Instagram. She wants content tailored to those specific groups.

It’s good to do research beforehand, social media sites tend to offer analytics tools to help with this. They’ll show you:

• How old your audience is?
• Where your audience is from?
• What devices your audience is using?
• How long your audience is engaged for?
• And much more

This will also help you decide what social media you should be using for your business?

“What do you want to achieve from social media?”

Next thing to note, is what are your goals? What do you want social media to do for your business? This differs from business to business, as they’ll want to achieve different things.

Website Traffic:

Do you want your posts on social media to help direct traffic towards your website and/or certain promotional page?

Engagement:

Do you want users to engage more with you on social media? Likes, comments, reposts, etc.

Increase followers:

Do you want to gain followers on social media?

Lead generation:

Do you want social media to help you bring in leads and potential customers?

Brand Awareness:

Do you want exposure for your brand? For more users to recognise you?

Of course, it can be a mix of the above, however, it’s good to narrow it down to one or two. This will help you the social media agency create high quality tailored content for specific goals.

Let’s give you another example. Tom also owns an American diner-style restaurant in East London and has just had a web design agency build him a brand spanking new website. He wants his followers on Instagram to see it. So he’s asked for posts tailored around the new website and he wants to direct traffic towards it. Using this information, a social media agency will know what they have to do and won’t waste time and money chasing a different target. This will help deliver results more efficiently. 

“Don’t be afraid to have a look at what your competitors are doing!”

Seeing how competitors are engaging with their audience on social media, will help give a major insight into your industry and help cover lost ground in catching up to them. As competitors will share common demographics, you’ll be able to see useful information, such as the types of posts they are creating and much more.

Remember Mary and Tom? We forgot to mention they’re businesses are about 5 mins away from each other in a busy area of East London. They both own American style-diners and both have websites and are using Instagram. This is a perfect example of knowing who your competitors are and what they are doing with their online presence, so you don’t fall miles behind. For example, Mary might want to consider going to a web design agency to build her diner a brand new website, as she’s seeing posts and ads pop up for Tom’s new website around her feed.

Let The iirth Company take care of your social media needs and help you achieve your goals.