Using social media to identify prospective customers

There are over 2.3 Billion social media users. Every 12 seconds a new social media account becomes active. These astonishing statistics are part of the reason that small businesses often become overwhelmed when they try to identify new prospective customers on social media. Fortunately, there are a few tricks of the trade that can help you to successfully identify and market to potential new customers.

3 Tips To Discover New Customers On Social Media

Finding new customers is one of the backbones to growing a business. The following three tips will help you to find new customers amongst a sea of people on social media.

1. Ask Your Current Customers. —  One of the most overlooked ways to identify prospects on social media is by asking your current customers. Whether you have a contact us form, newsletter sign-up, shopping cart, or online lead generation form you should add social media data collection fields. These fields will help you to identify what type of customer is also following you on social media. You can then use this information to craft share worthy posts that your customers can share with their network, which will attract new customers to your business and lead to a greater social media following for your company.
2. Use the Search Function Within Social Channels. — The beautiful thing about social media platforms is that they all collect user data. You can use the search functionality to quickly determine if your customers are active members of specific social media platforms. Using the search feature can be as simple as entering the name of your customer(s) in the designated search box. Once you have determined what customers are active members of the chosen social media platform, you can then create targeted advertisements that encourage them to follow your brand. After all, unless you actively promote your brand on social media, then your customers might not even know that you have a social media account.
3. Build Audience Personas. — Did you know that LinkedIn has over 450 Million members interested in building business relationships, however only 17 percent of U.S small businesses have accounts? Did you also know that 66 percent of content that users pin on Pinterest comes from published brand posts? These two facts showcase the importance of using social media to identify specific audience personas. In order to successfully market to your customers, you must understand who is using each network, how they are using it, and why they have chosen to be active on a specific social media platform. Once you have answered these questions, you can use the information to build audience personas, and then create posts or advertisements that market to those specific personas.

Through the help of the above three tips you can successfully identify potential new customers on each social media market. Armed with this knowledge you can then create targeted campaigns that appeal to each of your newly identified customer groups.