Have you researched what social media sites your target audience spends the most time on?     A lot of businesses have joined the social media marketing world and it is of great benefit to be present, but identifying who is using what medium is important.  According to a study conducted by the University of Maryland, nearly one in five small business owners are integrating social media into their marketing models.  A big part of using social media effectively is understanding your audience, much like traditional marketing methods that many of us are familiar with.

As a business owner you should have an idea of the general demographics of your ideal prospect.  Have you applied that logic to social media?  The paragraphs below dig a little deeper into who is hanging out where on the social media sites available on the web.

Where is your target audience hanging out?

According to The Nielsen Company, global consumers spent more than 5.5 hours on social networking sites in December 2009.  Compared to the 2008 study results, there has been an 82% increase of time spent on social media sites in one year.  Not only are people spending more time on social media sites, but a lot more people are using social media.  The greatest thing a small business owner can hope to tap into is where their target audience prefers to spend 5.5 social media hours.

Social sites

A few examples would be Facebook, Friendster, MySpace and Ning.  These sites can be broken down even further, MySpace tends to attract a lot of teen members and Ning has become popular for for connecting classmates and assisting is setting up reunions.  A recent study from Pew reported that 71% of the younger generation actively maintain a Facebook profile and 75% of the older generation maintain one as well.  Facebook seems to come out ahead of most social media outlets.  This site is relationship driven and people interact with people, groups and pages that they are interested in on a personal and social level.

Professional Sites

Some of the more commonly known professional sites are LinkedIn, FastPitch and Plaxo.  These sites can be used for business networking, job hunting and many people consider them to be lead generation vehicles a well.  These sites share the common objective of building a business community network and offer a means to strengthen and expand your business community.  Professional sites are fairly drilled own as far as member profiles.  You have the ability to execute very targeted marketing based on personal profiles and individual networks.  In addition, you have the ability to network and communicate with people that you have specific trade and business information about based on their profile.

Industry Specific Sites

Industry specific sites are are all too commonly overlooked.  Take the initiative to surf the Internet and find social media sites specific to your industry or industrie(s) that you serve.  An example is i-Meet, which is specifically geared towards event planners.  There is the ResearchGATE site that connects scientists and researchers for collaboration purposes.  Just to let you know how specific sites can be, check out veggppl.com, the vegetarian and vegan network.  The sites are out there, you need to determine who your audience is, what they are interested in and then look for the social media site that fits the audience.

Twitter Tweet

Twitter offers a lot of value for business owners and can be approached from different angles.  With real time search engine results, your tweets have a great chance of being found by people that are searching relevant content.  Some describe Twitter as a river of information that you dip into and dip out of at will.  People can follow you without the worry of email communication or a high level of commitment and Twitter is easy to use.  You have the freedom to create as many accounts as you want and followers are considered friends. Another advantage is that message boards or “tweets” itself can be viewable in public whether you’re friends or not, and you may include your URL as well which is a direct link to your site.

Twitter also has limitations.  There are  no applications rather than other sites like Facebook.  It does not offer groups, videos, blogs, ads, forums, and other unique and popular social networking menus.  Another challenge to Twitter is that the more you follow and the more followers you have the more challenging it becomes to manage information.

Despite the limitations, research dictates that Twitter is a social media force to be reckoned with.  Pew Internet studies suggest that 20% of 25 to 34 year old’s have used Twitter, with those 18 to 24 only 1 point behind (19%).   Online usage of Twitter is dominated by adults and has attracted far less teens to date.  Suffice to say, if your target audience is primarily teens then you may not attract prospects with Twitter.

Blogging

This is another outlet that relates to social media.  The beauty of blogging is you can create your own blog site or blog on your existing web site and target your content towards your industry.  The web is content driven and the more information and content you produce, linking back to your site, profile, etc, the greater web presence you achieve.  If you post a series of blogs with advice, input or content related to your product or service, interested parties will have an increased probability of finding you.  Another advantage of blogging is you can build a stronger community and attract prospects that are interested in content you publish relating to your industry.  If you want to start blogging, be sure to have the time, energy and creativity to commit.

Social Media Strategy

Best wishes executing your social media inventory and devising an effective and productive strategy.  Figure out where your audience prefers to congregate online and start a conversation with your prospects.  We cannot stress enough the importance of establishing a social media strategy.  Outline your long term plan and identify industry topics that you can speak fluently about.  Commit to a minimum amount of posts, tweets, etc that you will employ weekly to engage your online community.

RevenFlo is here to help if you need someone to navigate the Internet web waters with you.

The RevenFlo sponsored MeetUp Group schedules monthly pow wows to reach out to new members and connect with existing members.

This months meeting is scheduled for: Wednesday, March 24th.  Join us in Old Town Rock Hill at McHales Irish Pub (122 East Main Street Rick Hill, SC)

Things to discuss, fun to be had and hours to be logged.   Hope to see you there!  To learn more or join the Knowledge Worker MeetUp group go HERE.

Content Management Options from RevenFlo on Vimeo.

Hello all, we are crankin away here in Rock Hill on some great new Drupal projects, can’t wait to show them off. As you know 99% of our development and website builds are done in open source technologies like Drupal (these are full feature content management systems and so much more). Today I wanted to give you a glimpse on the ability Drupal has for creating a social experience. Read the rest of this entry »

RevenFlo is hired by Dean Hagey Real Estate Team in Fort Mill, SC, to develop a website with an open source content management system and a purchased theme, to integrate these, train him and his team on usage, and to push search engine placement for key sets of terms.

RevenFlo was hired by Tuttle Company commercial developers located in Rock Hill, SC. A website build in a open source content management system is planned, with staff training, and monthly search engine optimization.