Toward Segmented Social Audiences

November 2nd, 2011 by Tim

The launch of Google Plus has brought the concept of grouping connections to the general social media audience, and right on time. Brands have been working for years to grow social audiences, and as many have achieved significant scale, a mature approach to segmenting and nourishing these segments is required.

Catering to discrete social audience segments must start from the beginning – how and why are consumers showing up, anyway? – and that approach must evolve through the entirety of a brand/consumer social media relationship. This turns the idea of telling the audience to do what the brand wants on its head, a key quality of brands maturing their approach in social media.

To segment and care for social audiences, brands must:

• Monitor traffic inputs, seeking to understand the reasons consumers want to bring you into their feeds
• Create a content calendar aiming to test the audience size and overlap for key interactions
• Collect data above and beyond standard social platform analytics wherever possible to create a true Venn diagram of audience behavior
• Evaluate results and adjust efforts toward desired social audience segments and behaviors
• Continue to test and adjust

This document will give detail on how to positively affect each of the five mandates.

So you want a million fans, eh?

Branded social media presences like Facebook pages, Twitter streams and the rest share a unique feature separate from earlier interactive marketing channels – a public display of the size of the audience subscribed to the channel. Moving beyond the obvious business case for aggregating audiences in social channels, the fan/follower count has become a badge of honor and a point of pride for brands.

To that end, when brands say to agencies that their goal for an upcoming year in social media is to cross the 1 million fan mark, their agencies scramble to craft campaigns driving consumers into social channels.

Using advertising campaigns and social promotions grows social audiences beyond purely organic enthusiast audiences, a variety of motivations for participation emerge, including:

Source: Exact Target “Subscribers, Fans and Followers” research series. (Link)

Marketing efforts beyond basic communications to affinity groups are huge drivers for consumers following brands.

Now you have some fans.

Having worked for two or three years on aggregating social audiences, brand managers and agencies are now struck with a major issue – what do we do with these people?

To find the proper path in social media, brands must:

• Learn about their audience and their motivations
• Work with the audience to craft better stories
• Deliver on the audience’s motivations and co-crafted stories

Learning about your audience.

Understanding a social audience starts with a careful consideration of what brought consumers into the fold in the first place. As shown above, there are many – but no dominant – reasons for consumers to invite brands into their social experiences, driven by the many different tactics brands and agencies employ. To learn about their social audiences, then, a test plan where individual user data is gathered and cross-referenced must be implemented.

This test plan should seek to reveal:

• The splits of engaged and unengaged audience members
• How engaged audience members behave
• Which behaviors can be grouped for added effect
• Which behaviors the brand needs to

The test plan should include a content calendar presenting a variety of interactions/behaviors, each revealing the resonance of motivations to follow the brand. Data gathering is paramount within the test plan to build a true footprint of participation and overlap. Platforms may require users to allow access to their account through applications – which will limit participation – but the output data is much more valuable with user identifiers.

Once the data is captured and crunched, strategies can be crafted.

Developing Strategies/Crafting Stories

Using the brand’s audience intelligence – and a fair about of horse sense – social media strategies can be crafted for the brand and its audience segments. Standard processes certainly apply, but as a nuanced audience approach requires some additional considerations:

• Segment performance
  • Are we hoping for more of a certain type of activity?
  • Are we surprised by the frequency (or relative lack) per activity?
  • Do particular channels prove out strengths among audience segments?
  • Brand health
    • Certainly social audiences are very important, but should new audience members be a greater driver of social media priorities?
    • Look and prepare for change
      • Are segments emerging, merging, or otherwise changing?

As brands find that the audiences they’ve built in social media have nuances and groups that they could not have foreseen, the smartest will devise ways to intelligently and effectively engage those groups.

Tags: audience management, community management, segmentation, social media, strategy

Categories: Facebook, Google Plus, M80 Intelligence, Social Media Brand Management, Social Media Strategy, Twitter