Think you know your audience? Prove it!
The key to social media success, we are told again and again, is to “Know your audience”. And like many clichés, it’s true.
Understanding who you are targeting allows you to create exactly the kind of content that appeals to your potential clients, building up a relationship between you, so that when they are ready to buy – you are their obvious option.
Surface knowledge about demographics is nowhere near enough. To effectively appeal to them, you really need to understand their priorities, needs, worries.
Again and again, though, we have found that businesses assume they intuitively understand their potential clients – and then, when they sit in on focus groups, or read the market research, are shocked to discover that many of their basic assumptions were wrong. They may have been out-of-date, based on guesswork, or perhaps they just knew less about them than they thought.
Michael Stelzner is one of the biggest success stories online. Five years ago, he launched 
Good LinkedIn company pages are few and far between. In fact, bad ones are few and far between as well! Most companies simply don’t seem to bother completing the basic information on them, let alone updating them frequently.
We all know that LinkedIn is a virtual ocean of potential leads for your business, and that if you find the right contacts, you can transform your company.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary this week, Facebook produced a free video for most users, which highlighted some of their biggest moments on the social media network since they joined.
Do you trust your employees enough to let them promote your business on social media? They could be sharing your blogs on Twitter and LinkedIn, giving insights into interesting (non-confidential) parts of their job, and interacting with prospective clients – in short, building up relationships and drumming up work.
How easy do you find it to use LinkedIn? Is it as intuitive to use as Facebook and Twitter, for example, or do you struggle with some of its features?
Talk to executives in the pharmaceutical sector about social media, and there is still a lot of fear, confusion – and disinterest. Many executives are aware that social media has been a powerful marketing tool in other sectors, but are unsure how it can be applied in their own regulated industry, and don’t know where to start.
This week’s crucial social media news round-up: