How to Find Your Target Market with Social Media

July 3, 8:46 AMSalt Lake City Social Media ExaminerAnnaLaura Brown

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One of the crucial things that you must do in order to be successful with social media is to locate and follow and friend your target market. Although the exact ways to do this vary slightly from network to network, here are some basic ideas and principles to follow.

1. Join relevant groups and offer value to the group. Request to be friends with some of the members of the group.

2. Start your own group designed to offer value and to attract like-minded people and those in your target market to you.

3. Use the search feature to find people who fit your target market and request to be their friend or in the case of Twitter use Twitter search as well as other Twitter applications such as Twellow and WeFollow to find and follow people in your target market.

4. Focus on making sure that the majority of your content and updates are relevant and interesting to people in your target market. For example, it doesn't do any good to befriend and follow mostly people who are interested in social media and then to be talking about your dog or some other topic most of the time. Make sure that you are offering value to the people in your target market once you are following them and that you give them what they expect and what they are interested in reading about.

5. On Facebook you can click through to any of the hobbies or interests that you have listed on your profile and it will automatically do a search and pull up like-minded people who you can then request to befriend.

6. Look at the friends of your friends and consider adding a few of them. Be careful not to overdo this though as it can really annoy people.

7. Put a Facebook badge, a follow me on Twitter image or another social network icon on your blog and webpage and invite people to become your friend.

8. Make sure that your twitter url and facebook url are easy to remember and promote them wherever you can. This is especially important when interacting with like-minded people via chat, email or message boards and forums.

9. Consider including your social media network profile url's on your signature file and on your business cards to encourage your contacts to friend you.

10. Don't forget to do local searches as this makes it easier to find your target market since there are fewer numbers of people.

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