From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

Understanding audience

- No matter what your social media video strategy, one of the most important things you need to do is really dig in and understand your audience. Because it isn't always about reaching the largest audience, it's about reaching the right audience. You've got to align your message to that target audience. The more narrow your focus is and the more you help the audience identify themselves, the better your message will resonate with the right people. So when you're evaluating your audience, it's important to perform some smart research. There are many ways to do that but here are some general pieces of advice that can help you figure out how to effectively reach them. The first thing that I can recommend is that you immerse yourself in the spaces where your audience already is and absorb, learn, and strategize. This means that you should join various online professional communities across various social media platforms. Even if you don't heavily participate at first, just sit back and listen. Be a sponge. Try to analyze trends, behaviors, and content. Try to figure out what type of content is already resonating with this crowd. See what is and isn't working. Then try going even further to see if you can identify content and delivery methods that might be missing. In this listening role, choose thought leaders to follow, see who is succeeding in the space, and try to figure out why. When you follow successful people, you can decide how you may want to emulate various strategies and also find ways to carve your own path. As you become comfortable in these online spaces, you can certainly begin participating when you feel ready. By making strategic connections, you can begin asking targeted questions, you can interview people, send surveys, form focus groups, or just ask for casual opinions and advice. Now keep in mind, everything I've just said is true for social media audiences at large. But specifically, when talking about video strategy, it's important to incorporate enough research about your audience's video consumption habits. You need to get a sense of what videos your audience watches, how much of each video they watch, and how they interact with the video content. So if you can, try to collect data on these additional video consumptions habits. Obviously, if you create your own videos, you'll have lots of useful built-in analytics tools at your fingertips. But if you're trying to analyze video habits of external videos that you don't create, that type of data isn't always readily available. Still, though, there are ways to get that sort of information. For example, one tool that you can use to look at that video analytics is called TubeBuddy, which is a browser extension. As you can see, TubeBuddy breaks down the video analytics in terms of views, engagement, search engine optimization, and more. You can also see the tags that people use, which can help you figure out what tags that you might like to use for your own videos. It also incorporates some awesome video compare features that allow you to see how different videos are doing against one another. Now of course, once you've done your research and start creating content, you'll need to be more aware of your audience than ever. So as you adopt a video strategy, you should give your audience the ability to qualify themselves, to see if they should even be watching your video. They should be able to easily understand what the video is about and what's in it for them. Earn their interest, gain their trust, and establish a clear call to action in the video. Do all of this while respecting your audience's expectations, habits, and time constrictions. When you then will you gain a loyal following that will look forward to engaging with your videos in the short and the long-term.

Contents