Social Media Tips: How Good Is Your Audience?

The primary purpose of Social Media is connecting people, and allowing you to share content with a vast audience. However, building an audience isn’t  just a numbers game. Today’s social media tips will have you thinking about quality over quantity when assessing your social media audience.

When you’re on a social network, you’re dealing with other people. Other human beings. Amongst the millions of them, you audience is waiting to be formed. But it’s not just about racking up followers early on, that’ll come later, provided your content is of a consistent high quality. Build a solid foundation based on quality first.

Social Media Tips: Target High Impact Users

Naturally, you want your followers to interact with you and share your content, right? But who are they sharing your content with? Have you looked at the people that follow them? How many people follow them? And importantly, do they interact and take notice of that user’s information? When you stumble across a user like this that has an interest in your niche, this is where outreach comes in.

Follow them, interact with them, retweet them, boost their ego. Offer an alternative opinion to something that they post. Don’t just thrust your content in their face. Be subtle. People are more likely to think highly of you if you contribute to the greater discussion or stroke their ego a bit, rather than treating them as a retweet farm. This can be instant, but may often take days or weeks before they follow you. But don’t stop just because they’ve followed you, because the unfollow is just as easy as the follow.

But once you’ve got people with large, interactive follower bases on board, you can build on that foundation. The retweets and follows will start to come naturally.

Social Media Tips – Evaluate how responsive your audience is

So you’re starting to get followers, but how good are they? Do your followers actually care about what you say? The best followers are interactive, they’ll challenge what you say, retweet your content and share content with you.

Ideally, when you share content, (links to your site, interesting pages from elsewhere, your products, etc) the last thing you want is for it to be ignored. Do your followers click your content when you share it? Compare your social media traffic/referrals to your overall follower count, is the ratio of followers to traffic good enough?

Social Media Tips: The Ideal Follower

My formula for the perfect twitter follower:

Is a clicker & sharer

Active at the same time as you.

Has roughly the same amount or more followers.

Has plenty of active clickers & sharers

Is interactive (mentions, RTs)

Has followers interested in your main topics

Of course, these are few and far between, but it’s always worth keeping an eye out for people like this, because they’ll be the ones that will prove instrumental in your social media success.

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