Oh Where, Oh Where Did My Audience Go?

Let’s start with social media. Do you have a LinkedIn account? What about Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? If you said yes to any of these, we’re off to a good start. However, it doesn’t just end there. Who’s following you? Who’s liking all of your posts? Do you ever find yourself saying, “Oh where, oh where did my audience go?” We’re here to help you find your audience, so you don’t have to sing the rest of that nursery rhyme.

So, your doing original content…now what?
We all know that in order to get started in social media, you have to utilize different media sources in order to have daily content. You are using job postings as content, but hopefully not more so than your curated articles and original content. You’ve created a social media editorial calendar and you understand that you need to have a frequency when getting your content out there. Hopefully in the midst of all of this, you are using your keywords to help drive your audience as well as making sure your editorial is significant to your audience. You should be looking at your current audience in the people that are following your blog and in those that are following you on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. But why is your audience not growing? To grow your audience, you have to look beyond the content in order to drive certain behavior.

Analyzing your audience
Audience analysis is certainly one of the more challenging areas of social media. When you look at your RSS blog feed, you should be able to see who is following you and how many are following you. The same goes for looking at your followers on all other social media platforms. When you evaluate this, it’s important to periodically review who those followers are. It’s, quite literally, a manual process of going through your followers and seeing what they do. This is a little easier to do on LinkedIn compared to the other platforms. Personally, I tend to track my Facebook audience on LinkedIn in order to determine if they are candidates, clients, or neither. When you’re conducting your audience analysis, it is something to be more thorough about. Are you attracting more Project Managers, Java Developers or people from the development suite? Are you attracting clients from various industries? When we do audience analysis, the data tells us where we’re having success as well as where we’re not. Without the original data, audience building will become too difficult to understand. When you look at the prioritization of audience analysis, please put it higher on your list. Without it, you are simply attempting to grow your audience as opposed to determining how to grow your audience.

Building your audience
Audience building is the result of your audience analysis, social media calendar, curated articles, the jobs you’re posting, etc. With each of these efforts that you’re putting out, you have to look at a number of things. For instance, what are the targeted trending keywords in your space? A modest amount of research shows you which keywords are performing better than others. The reason this is important is because your audience is likely looking at those targeted trending keywords. Please notice that its’ not just targeted keywords, it’s targeted trending keywords. Each of the social media outlets report on what is trending. You need to search through those in order to determine which of those best matches your keywords.

You should be using your keywords as hashtags. However, if you are simply using “tech staffing” or “healthcare staffing” as your hashtags, you are not getting very far unless you are lucky. This example is not using targeted trending keywords, which is essential when building your audience. The fact is, if you found out #HCstaffing or #HCrecruiting was performing better than #healthcarestaffing, you will not be found on those trending keywords. Getting your message out to your audiences is equally important to the creation of the content and the plan on how to distribute and analyze.

Additionally, look into the various groups that are on the social media platforms. Whether you are healthcare staffing, technology staffing, or clinical staffing, there are a variety of groups that you’ve most likely already joined. If you have not joined those other groups, you should. Distributing your content through these groups ensures that you are sending your content to the right audience and that you will additionally grow your audience with the right people.

Lastly, we always recommend sponsored advertising. There are many options on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. for targeted sponsored advertising. With your advertising, you are not simply putting out an ad like you would in a newspaper. You are putting out an ad that is targeted to the audience you want. You can target your ads to your client audience, specifically speaking, if you do better in oil and gas you can target your ads toward that industry. Further, if you do better with Project Managers in oil and gas, you can target your ads to that specific audience. The advertising capabilities within social media are so tightly targeted and allow you to manage your spend so efficiently, that this will help grow your audience.

Once thing I want to mention to everyone is that there is a great deal of audience building that takes place within the purchasing of likes and followers. These likes and followers are non-reputable and, frankly, not helpful. They are outlets that build a number that no one is impressed with and they do nothing for you. They will make you feel like you accomplished something that you really didn’t accomplish. In at least one case, I had met someone who had 1,680 followers. When we analyzed the audience, we found that they had only 52 actual followers and they had purchased the rest of them. They felt really good about the 1,680 followers they had. The problem with this is that they became complacent with building their audience because they felt that had accomplished a goal. Secondly, they felt that the goal of 1,680 followers was a good goal, while some of their competitors had over 40,000 followers. They were comparing themselves to people that only had around 100 followers. The fact is that the practice of purchasing followers is not a solid practice, and it should be avoided as it is a complete waste of time.

There are various campaigns that you can create that we call “social media giving campaigns”. These campaigns are designed to draw followers from your audience by your agreement to make a donation for every follower that you get. The giving campaigns should be tightly targeted, but they are very efficient for multiple things. First, you receive a better reputation in the market for giving to a charity; Second, you are gaining followers because they are causing you to give money to a

charity; Third, you will gain the audience that you are seeking.
These various practices will help you grow your audience, and you will no longer have to ask yourself, “oh where, oh where did my audience go?” Good luck to you and let us know if we can assist you in any way. We look forward to seeing all of your audiences grow quickly.

About S.J.Hemley Marketing
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations.