Regardless of the size of your business, you cannot afford to skip out on social media. Not only does it help you engage with current and potential customers, but also gives your brand validity. Today, most consumers expect companies to have a social media presence. Furthermore, many customers feel that brands fail to meet their social media expectations.
If you’re struggling to find and connect with your target audience on social media, you can utilize these social media audit tools to help achieve your goals. These solutions help you optimize your social media marketing efforts and unveil more about your customers than you thought possible. Think of these tools as the gift that keeps giving: you can use them to help target your customers time and time again, and refine your strategy as you go based on results.
Before you use any of these tools, create an ideal customer or avatar. Who is buying your product? How much money do they typically make, and are they looking to save or splurge? What is their age? Jot down each of these demographics and details, and use them to guide you on the hunt. These buyer personas are necessary for any marketing campaigns, and will be very useful when using social media tools to find them. Here are tools to guide you:
Facebook Ads Manager
There’s so much Facebook can help you learn about who your target audience is. There are countless targeting options on this social media platform: you can target people who have purchased certain products, specific interests, and people who even live in certain geographical areas. This is the place where you really hone in on your customer: are you selling high-end baby blankets? With Ads Manager, you can target people who are pregnant or searching for baby products for their friends.
You can also use Facebook Insights to discover where you need to focus more of advertising and outreach efforts. For example, if you are targeting three different types of ideal customers, Insights could show you exactly what percentage of those customer types are interacting with your brand. Here you might discover that Ideal Customer #3 comprises 5% of your engagement, and you could use this statistic to spend more time targeting that demographic.
Brandle
The Brandle Presence Manager is a proprietary tool social media software solution that allows users to discover, manage, and report on their Web and social media presence. It does so by conducting a series of audits online and across your social media channels.
It works by identifying Points of Presence (POPs) that match your campaign and brand. Essentially, Brandle scours thousands of sources for any mention of your company, allowing you to prioritize areas of opportunity. You can also generate inventory a myriad of reports, including individual social network reports, domain reports, and risk management process reports.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best social media monitoring tools and has a long, successful reputation for providing powerful analytics. They were one of the first on the scene, and continue to be a driving force for analyzing consumer behavior across social channels. This tool provides several visual streams for all of your social profiles.
The Dashboard is clean and simple to use, and recent features include a Twitter customer feedback interaction, where brand managers and marketers can manage and respond to help inquiries posted on Twitter directly through Hootsuite. You can also quickly add text and photo content all in one place, and manage posts and larger campaigns in advance. Most importantly, it integrates with several other major programs and CRMs, like Microsoft Sharepoint and Yammer.
TweetReach
How far do your tweets actually go? You can learn this and more with TweetReach. This tool uses your brand’s URL to show you exactly how effective your tweets are through one powerful metric: reach. They have free and paid versions of the program.
In one case, the owner of the QuickSprout blog used TweetReach to teach him how to get more retweets. It also showed him that 50 of the blog’s tweets had reached nearly 50,000 people. Beyond just a number, TweetReach shows you additional analytics, such as where the engagement is coming from, which tweets are more popular, and what times are more popular.
