How to find your audience on social media
“Your prospects will be easy to find. All you need to do is act like them, have the problem they have, and try to solve it. Where you go to do that is where you’ll find them.”
Where to start? Right here!
As with any marketing tactic or strategy, you must know your target audience. If you have not yet defined who they are, I recommend you start there. You can also easily find general demographics for each channel in a Google search. Here is one, and another, and another. Just make sure to check the date of the post/research so you have the most current versions.
Where to find your peeps
If you’ve been in business for some time, you can find the commonalities among your best clients and distill those facets from there. For example, if you have ten clients that have been great to work with over the prior years, leverage that small segment to discover characteristics of their social behavior.
Also, you can learn a lot from similar solopreneurs who are solving similar problems to your solution. Friend them and observe what they’re posting and the level of engagement they’re having. Make notes about what you like and dislike about their social behavior.
Here is a step-by-step guide to build a smart approach to your social media posting and where you’re most likely to find your prospects:
Work from existing clients. Take those ten (or 20, 30, 50, 100) great clients and make a list of how each of them discovered you. Referral, a friend/colleague, past employer, or some form of marketing content that you published. You will learn a lot about them from that, as well as how you’ve been getting business. You can take this intelligence and use it to reverse engineer your content marketing once you isolate the social channels you end up targeting. It will also show you pretty clearly where they hang out and who they follow/like.
Poll/survey existing clients. Depending on the amount of clients and even prospective clients you have, you can manually interview each or if you have many, create a survey that asks them about their social behavior, where they “surf” and where they “prospect” and where they look for help. From this data, you can cross reference the prior list and see if any patterns show up. If they do, you’re on the right track.
Review your past engagement levels. If you have done any social media publishing or have spent any time in the channels, you need to assess where you’ve gotten the most engagement and interest. Depending on the content you’ve posted and where, you’ll learn fast what channels have the most engagement for the top of your sales funnel.
Make assumptions and do some research. You can make some assumptions about the channels your target audience frequents. If you examine their problem, and search the solution to that problem, you can see where the results have presences on social media. It takes some back-tracking and digging, but if you’re really committed to figuring it out, you can discover a lot. You just have to commit time to doing so.
Don’t do the spray and pray approach
The worst thing you can do as a solo is dedicate a ton of time to every channel posting, duplicating posts and basically being “human spam.” To avoid this headache of social media posting, I highly recommend you adopt a strong content marketing strategy.
This is why solopreneurs get discouraged so quickly by the burden of social media posting. They really don’t know how to manage it ongoing. They get jazzed and start posting like crazy, without a strategy, and then they drop off and get discouraged because they don’t get results.
My thoughts on audiences in social media channels:
LinkedIn: Best for business to business and professionals who are looking for help and connections. LinkedIn will continue to grow in popularity and become more and more user-friendly toward paid advertisers.
Facebook: Business happens on Facebook, believe it or not. However, you have to be selective in investing in FB because there are several markets that are saturated and prospects have become very skeptical of the marketed value. Examples of this are life coaches, marketing coaches, realtors and software platforms. Understanding your target client will help you leverage FB so it works well.
Instagram: Given the visual basis of this medium, it is a scroll-happy channel that is harder to get people to “slow down” and consume content. Insta has many different aspects that you can leverage in your social media strategy, and is a close second to FB (and also owned by FB, btw).
Twitter: Great if you have a following that feeds on your ideas, recommendations, referrals and tidbits. The Blue Bird channel is an anomaly, and sometimes can be an additional distraction if you don’t have a good social media strategy for posting. The cool thing about the Bird is that you can put “tweetables” in your content marketing that helps people share your wisdom. Twitter can be a place for you to express yourself without a filter and build your personality on
YouTube: I always recommend having a YouTube channel. It is as powerful a search engine as Google, is owned by Google, and can showcase YOU in the best way possible. The strategy of how to use YouTube should be designed around your overall marketing strategy and fit into your lead generation strategy as well.
Pinterest: This is the most visual of channels, and is not necessarily where people consume written content. If you are in an industry that is highly visual, such as interior design, construction, decorating, or you have physical products you can showcase, you should definitely have a presence on Pinterest. (Houzz if you’re in interior design or related business).
Snapchat and TikTok: To be perfectly honest, I don’t have much interest in these two channels as their demographics are much younger than my market as well as my member’s markets. However, for the demographics that do use these channels, they use them with a fervor. In my opinion, TikTok is an entertainment medium that is highly addictive. It also attracts the younger crowds, who post and consume thumb-flip after thumb-flip of scrolling nonsense. I have yet to see this become a viable advertising and business building platform, but the eyes are there.
Clubhouse: I really like Clubhouse for meeting new people. Pure audio has always been a favorite medium of mine, and why I always kept my podcast purely audio without video. However, Clubhouse is a time suck. And it’s not a channel that you can multitask well with, you need to be paying attention as the host may call you to the stage at any time, and the etiquette is very important. I have connected with prospects in Clubhouse rooms, however, because they are cold prospects, they require a lot of nurturing, and in my business, high-touch nurturing. Clubhousers are in there to grow their businesses and audience just like you are, so be aware. None of my CH prospects have converted to prospects, however, I haven’t been very focused on nurturing them either. CH is an exciting new channel type, and it can be very educational and provide a strong sense of community for solopreneurs.
Think like your target client
When you start thinking like your prospective client, you have a better compass for engaging on social media. Make sure you are commenting on posts related to what your client would comment on or have interest in. This is especially powerful in the LinkedIn platform where you can see a poster/commenter’s title/role with their profile picture. If that title/role is correctly written (meaning, it says the problem you solve and who you solve it for), that prospective client will check you out and likely connect with you.🍀
