The Pulse

Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter are social communication channels. You could think of them like Radio or TV, except they are way more interactive.

Facebook is massive, in NZ there are over 2 million people with profiles.  Australia has just hit the 10 million mark.

For most businesses cutting through the noise even with great content and sharp adverts is tough. You can’t be everything to everyone so my tip this week is to ‘hyper target’ your Facebook page, make it niche, special and super relevant to those people you really want to engage.

Now this takes a bit of thought and planning so sit down with your team and pick one aspect of your business that could work really well with Facebook. Think about the demographics using Facebook, when might your desired audience be most active, what information is going to appeal to them the most.

For one recruitment company I ran a workshop with I found out that they wanted to attract engineers in Ireland and the UK to work in New Zealand. We spent 30 minuets doing some research on the Facebook advert builder to see how many people there were under various categories until we found the right audience to target. We looked at targeting people with certain job titles, seniority or even which company they currently work for. We found a niche of about 2,000 people, created a Facebook page and started programming our weeks content schedule.

The Facebook page is only viewable or searchable by people to live in the UK or Ireland and the adverts are only being displayed to a very specific group. This makes our ad spend more efficient, effective and means we can run longer campaigns, testing copy, images and pain points to asses which ones work the best.

As Facebook changes and opens up the social graph you’ll be able to hyper target your messages to smaller groups of people that might have visited your website before, are watching a specific movie or YouTube video for instance. But for the moment content is still king. You must know and understand your target market and then deliver relevant and sharable content to influence their opinions or behaviour in your favour. Content starts the conversation, sparks the idea in someone’s mind that perhaps New Zealand could be a great place to take the family for a few years, after all we do have plenty of engineering work.

So that’s my advice for hyper targeting (I love that phrase) your Facebook presence. You can and probably should do the same for Twitter as well. People certainly like to follow people and businesses where it’s clear what the account is about and what information they are going to receive. Social networks are only going to get noisier so refining your activity could make you a whole lot more relevant now and in the future.

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz