Research Outline

Social Media Branding: Cultivating an Audience

Goals

To determine best practices in cultivating an audience on social media and learn about their interests as well as themes that resonate with them.

Early Findings

Cultivating an Audience on Social Media

Use data to identify audience

  • Being able to identify one's target audience is one of the first steps to building a social media audience and tools such as Google Analytics are quite useful in this regard. Other useful sources include Facebook Audience Insight, the Pew Research Center which conducts social media use surveys and Smart Insights.
  • Social listening tools can be used to gather insights about competitors within the space. Examples of these tools include BuzzSumo, Google Alerts and Hootsuite.
  • Demographic information including age, location, income, and job will be useful to have.

Paid Advertising

Choose Appropriate Channels

Use Hashtags

  • Using industry hashtags or brand-related hashtags is a good way to increase visibility and engage more of the target audience. For example, Coca Cola used #ShareACoke to engage more consumers.
  • The use of hashtags attracts persons from the target audience based on keywords. Tools that can be used to make this a success include Twitter Chats, Keyhole.co (paid), All-Hashtag (free) and Hootsuite.
  • Hashtags also makes it easier for the target audience to find the brand and engage in trending topics or events.