You’ve got followers. They see your posts and send out posts of their own. These followers are individuals just like you and me. Most people only know a small portion of their audiences. However, it is possible for any person on social media to understand their entire audience.
It’s a strong statement to say that one person can understand his/her entire social media audience. But even the people with millions of followers can know some things about everyone in their audiences.
So how does someone with a large audience come to know the people within their audience? Better yet, how does this happen in a time efficient manner? The people with millions of followers are not scrolling through one follower at a time, looking at profiles, and having conversations with all of those people. That would take too long.
You serve your social media audience by knowing what that audience wants. The way you know your social media audience is by breaking them up into categories. You break them into categories based on how they engage with you and your content.
Each time you send a post, look at how people engage with that post. Some of your posts will get more engagement than others. When you see that your social media posts about a certain topic always get more shares, then you know your audience wants more of that content.
Early in the game, I discovered that the tweets of mine that received the most attention contained Twitter tips. Blog posts geared towards social media weren’t far behind.
When I made this realization, I decided to write more blog posts about Twitter. That’s why many of my blog posts are geared towards Twitter. The decision paid off. Most of the blog posts I have written about Twitter have been tweeted hundreds of times. My blog post 70 Amazing Twitter Tips has been tweeted over 1,000 times.
I simply knew what my audience wanted and gave them more of it.
While I enjoyed seeing the success of my Twitter related blog posts, I knew that there was more to me than Twitter. I didn’t want this blog to turn exclusively into a Twitter blog. I also wanted to write blog posts about Facebook, Pinterest, productivity, and other business-related topics.
I decided to write blog posts about a greater variety of topics and share them to my social media audience. I saw how my audience engaged with the content I posted and then drew conclusions. My blog posts about Pinterest and blogging received more attention. Then, my productivity blog posts started to pick up engagement.
But inevitably, some blog posts stood out from the others.
I analyzed every blog post I wrote to see which ones got the most social shares. It wasn’t enough for me to know that blog posts geared towards productivity got more social shares. I needed to know specific information (i.e. do more people in my audience engage with my time management blog post or my goal achievement blog post?).
I am not trying to limit the topics I can write about. Rather, I am identifying the most desirable topics. That allows me to know what topics to focus on but also which topics I can incorporate into my other blog posts.
When I write a blog post about Twitter, should I incorporate goal achievement or should I incorporate finding the time to make it happen? If I incorporate both of them, which one do I focus on more? Answering these challenging questions allows you to write better content that your social media audience will love.
Quick Summary Of Categories
Here are some of the categories that my followers are in (it is possible for certain followers to be in more than one category):
Twitter advice
Social media advice
Pinterest advice
Blogging advice
Productivity
With this list, I know which blog posts I should write. I can also think of ways to combine certain topics together so I can appeal to a larger percentage of my social media audience.
Observe How Your Social Media Audience Engages With You
The larger your social media audience becomes, the more you can rely on the notifications tab to understand your audience. I look at the notifications tab to see what people say about my content. I see what people like (and dislike).
Checking every day allows me to see certain patterns develop. This is how I identify which of my blog posts are outperforming most of my other blog posts. This identification is critical for getting more blog traffic from Twitter.
In the beginning, I could tweet more frequently and automatically double my daily visitors from Twitter. Now I tweet once every 15 minutes. I don’t envision myself tweeting once every 7.5 minutes anytime soon. That’s too much even for me.
I get more traffic from Twitter by tweeting my most popular content more often. If this popular content continues to gain popularity, then I know this is a topic my social media audience is interested in. At that point, I begin to create a training course all about that topic.
That’s why Twitter Domination was the first training course I ever published on Udemy. At the time, people recognized me as a Twitter expert more than anything else.
Once you serve your audience and see how they respond, you get to know your audience. Then, you can create products based on what you know about your audience. This cycle ultimately results in you constantly serving your audience and providing them with more value as the days go by.
In Conclusion
Social media is the best platform to grow an audience without paying a penny. I had over 100,000 followers spread across my social networks before I started investing in tools and ads that I now use to exponentially grow my audience.
Regardless of your audience’s size and growth rate, you must learn more about the individuals within your audience. What type of content do they want to read? What do they need that you can provide? Answering these two questions will let you know how you can serve your audience better.
Serving your audience better allows you to know the people in your audience better. Once you serve your audience with free content that you know they like, you can then serve them with products related to those same topics.
How do you engage with your social media audience? What tips do you have for us so we can better serve our audiences? Do you know what your social media audience wants? Sound off in the comments section below.
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