Marcus Richards
Social media is the cornerstone of every effective business strategy, and startups are no exception. From big brands to SMEs, social media offers an array of benefits, from expanded reach, affordable scaling, and a plethora of ad opportunities.
Beyond these benefits, social media also gives startups an excellent resource in the form of their social audience: understand your audience, and you’ll know how to exploit their habits for better marketing and business strategies overall.
Read on to discover how your startup can exploit social audience habits for better results.
Why is your social audience so important?
As a startup, your social audience is a goldmine for actionable insights into your overall marketing and business strategy. It is a form of market research, helping you understand your target audience on a deeper level.
Audience insight is essential to growing your startup. It helps you pivot everything, from your product ideation and marketing channels to content creation and social strategy.
In short, it helps you adjust and adapt your overall strategy to get the best possible results, simply by connecting with your audience as individuals, rather than a collective many.
But as a startup, you have plenty of audiences to draw upon: your email lists, for example, or your website traffic. Why is your social audience such a valuable resource?
The answer lies in its ability to capture and present customer data. While your other audiences should not be discounted from your strategy, your social audience provides far more detailed and granular insights into your target audience.
The platforms on which your social audience is active — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on — possess immense amounts of customer data. From personal interests and location to vocabulary and demographics, social platforms are able to capture and convey this information in an easy-to-understand way.
Consequently, your social audience and their habits online are a veritable treasure trove for your startup, helping it grow within those first few years.
How to understand and exploit your social audience’s habits
We’ve looked at why your social audience and their habits are so important. Now let’s examine a few ways that you can understand your social audience and exploit their habits for better results.
Source granular audience insights via social analytics
One of the best and most precise ways of exploiting your social audience’s habits online is by using your social platform’s analytics.
Almost every single social media network comes with some form of built-in analytics function. These let you track and assess a wide variety of metrics, from ad click-through rates and likes to follower count and audience sentiment.
Beyond this, your analytics also helps you analyze your social audience on a more meaningful level too. As well as fixed features such as location or gender, you can also discover your audience’s personal interests, hobbies, and so on.
These data-backed insights into your social audience let you create bespoke marketing strategies that speak to your audience not as a collective, but as individual human beings.
For example, using a subscription management service such as Chargebee, you could create bespoke subscription and pricing models based on your customers’ individual needs, adding the overall quality of your offering.
For bootstrapped startups, the built-in analytics provided by your social platforms are sufficient enough to help you mine these insights — for now. But as your startup grows, you may wish to look to dedicated third-party tools for more specific insights.
Apps such as Brandwatch offer comprehensive analytical functions that let you track potential reach, real-time conversation insights, and even competitor analysis. These help you understand and leverage your social audience’s habits across a range of channels.
Run paid ads for low-cost audience tests
Social media also offers you a great way to run tests on what does (or doesn’t) work for your specific customer base. They are creative and versatile, providing an array of metrics you can use to gauge your campaign’s efficacy.
Dropshipping, in particular, is a great tactic for running low-cost audience tests with PPC ads — indeed, the aforementioned low-cost nature of dropshipping is why it’s considered the easiest way to sell online.
You can list products at no cost, so you don’t need to stock anything, and it’s a great way to get proof-of-viability for your business concepts.
Run some ads with dropshipping products to see what sticks and what doesn’t and analyze the results to determine what behaviors your audience typically uses on social media. The results will give you some insight no matter what they are.
For instance, you might find that your audience habitually clicks on ads with images more than those without. This is just an example, but it highlights how real social ads can offer deep insight into your audience’s habits on social media.
Leverage your customer community for greater audience insights
As your startup grows, it’s essential that you build a customer community to support it. This essentially consists of a collection of people online who share the same interests, hobbies, and often backgrounds — your brand and product or service is what brings them together.
This customer community is one of the best resources for identifying and exploiting your social audience’s habits. Nurture your customer community by hosting contests and giveaways, inviting their input via solid content cascaded across your social channels.
Further to this, provide excellent customer service and a unique brand positioning too. This gives your customers an entry point into your brand beyond simply offering a great product or service.
Customer communities provide useful insight into what your audience thinks of your brand and its product or service. Have conversations with them via your social channels and understand what they think works, what doesn’t work, and what they would like to see from you in the future.
Beyond this, you can also discover more about them as individuals too. Learn what they care about beyond your brand, such as their hobbies or social issues. You could even identify how they speak, what cultural references they use, and so on.
By using this granular information, you can pivot your marketing strategies to make them more personal, making them more effective as a result.
The tips above are just a few ways you can use your social audience to enhance and inform your overall business strategy during your startup’s first crucial. With the insights gleaned from these tactics, you can better connect with your audience, ensuring more qualified results in 2023 and beyond.
