By now, most of us have some knowledge about how to use social media, both personally and professionally.
We know how to post, certainly, and occasionally know when and what to post to get a good amount of traction. But, when was the last time you actually tracked the most recent behaviour of your audience? It’s easy to stick to one set of posting rules and not deviate from it, but just as the social media platforms evolve in their offerings, so too do audience behaviours. And, not all platforms are made equal. Are the same people visiting you on each platform? Are they visiting each platform for the same purpose? What do they want to get from you (and so, interact with you) on each? These are all questions you should be asking yourself to get the most out of your socials existence.
Every single social media platform provides an ability to track your audience and conversions.
But, not all reveal the same information. Some are more comprehensive than others, and some weight certain data over others in their priority list. Here’s what each platform provides:
Facebook has an area called audience insights where you can find everything about a particular audience from the basic demographics of age and sex through to their favourite Facebook pages and websites.
Under “Insights”, go to “Audience”. Here, you can see some vital statistics about your existing followers including their age range, gender and location. Combine this data with your buyer personas and the information you collected from competitor research.
With LinkedIn, we use a product called ‘matched audiences’, where we can get information in industry, companies and job titles visiting your website, reading your posts and following your feed.
These insights provide you with the ability to track all visitors, their areas of interest and, in a lot of cases, start to create segmented and specific audiences; I.e., abandoned cart, pages of interest, digital behaviours etc.
This segmentation of audiences then assists you for advertising purposes, placing contextual advertising in front of the right audience. For example, you might notice that when you search a product or service, or engage with a social media ad (no matter how briefly), you’ll find that it follows you while you’re active on platforms – even if it’s not the same platform you initially engaged.
You can expand this further by cloning your ideal audience and then advertising to similar buyer personas and a wide range of options beyond this.
Contextual advertising is not remarketing.
Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. The advertisements themselves are selected and served by automated systems based on the context of what a user is looking at. Where as remarketing (a form of contextual advertising), works more from someone having engaged in some capacity with your online presence, for example you can retarget people who have spent so much time on your website, followed you on FB or abandoned their shopping cart. There are many opportunities to use remarketing.
How cloning works
Using Facebook or Linkedin as an example, we use a product called ‘Lookalike audiences’ where the platform takes an existing audience that is engaging with your business online and you can start to advertises to like audiences with similar demographics and social media behaviour.
How it has worked for us
We have used lookalike audiences with some of our larger campaigns, such as Domaine Homes. We found that certain ad campaigns were proving successful regarding click-throughs and conversions, so we used lookalike audiences to slowly grow their reach and push the campaign further on the platform.
Understanding your social media audience in a deeper, more nuanced, way will be enormously helpful to not just better your socials game, but to use it to contribute to your overall conversions and understanding of who your true demographic is. It will benefit several aspects of your business’s success on and off the digital space, allowing you to better serve your customers and future customers.
