I feel like this is the easiest way to get off track with social media, and I have found myself fall into this on a regular basis. Depending on your industry, it is easy to start creating content for those that are your peers and not your target audience. Of course, if your peers are your target audience, you can completely skip this post.
What do I mean by peers? These can be people that do a job similar to you in your industry. For example, say you are a small business that makes soap, your peers would be other soap makers. Now while it is great to engage with them through social media, your target market is most likely retailers that would carry your soap and direct customers.
I feel like it is pretty natural to start engaging with your peers, because they are more likely to comment and provide feedback due to their shared passion in what you do. The problem becomes when you start creating content to increase engagement with your peers rather than who you are targeting. Again, it is so easy to do because you want to increase the engagement you are seeing, but it doesn’t get you closer to your goals.
Take a step back and look at who has been engaging you. Is it your target audience? Is it your peers? Is it both? If your answer is your target audience or both, then you get a gold star for this assignment. If it is mainly your peers, you still have to dig a little deeper as to why. Maybe your target audience isn’t technically inclined causing them to not leave comments, but are still reading.
Realistically, you can look at your content and see if it is geared to your audience or not:
- Does it use the language they use?
- Does it solve their problems and/or address their pain points?
- Are you being a resource or just promoting?
If you still aren’t sure, try a new approach. Throw some new types of content out there and see what happens. I’ve done that right here and have heard some positive feedback. What have I missed?