Locating and building a target audience is one of the biggest challenges for businesses pondering to take the plunge into the social media world. While building any audience is easy, it offers little value unless it’s ‘well-targeted’ and willing to engage with your business. You may be about to launch the next big-game changer campaign, but unless you have a target audience that it caters to, it is likely to fall flat.

As a social media expert and influencer, I realize and appreciate the importance of a business being able to locate its target audience with social media. In this post, I present 5 simple yet effective steps for a business to locate and build its target audience in the social media world.

1) Do your homework first!

I often say that social media isn’t a shortcut route for businesses to succeed. It was never meant to be. However, if you are prepared to work hard and act smart, the odds will be stacked heavily in favor of your business to succeed. So, now that you’ve made up your mind to have a social media audience for your business, how do you start?

Identify the kind of people that you want to associate with. What kind of people would be interested in your products and services depending on geography, age, sex, income etc. If you don’t know who your target audience is, how can you locate them?

Typically, a business might be interested in connecting with one or more of the following:-

• Existing customers
• Potential customers
• Partners
• Affiliate businesses
• Industry Experts
• Thought leaders

2) Keywords are the key!

Determining the best-suited keywords and key phrases for your business is often a good starting point. Make it a point to have at least couple of primary keywords and a handful of secondary ones including your products, services, industry terms, competitive keywords and anything else that will match you with your potential audience.

3) Advanced Search

Both Facebook and Twitter offer comprehensive search functionality. Twitter offers an advanced search feature that lets you find users based on keywords and phrases. The regular search on Twitter is a good way to quickly fire queries to know who’s saying what about the topics you’re interested in.

Facebook is quiet search-friendly as well, it allows you to search people by company (yours or competitor business) and by email as well.

4) Tools

One of the biggest USP of social media is that “If there’s something that you find it difficult to do, there’s a tool for that”. I’m especially fond of Buzzom to locate my targeted audience as it lets me scan through bios of millions of users in quick time. Further, I can send a mass follow request and get instantly connected with a large number of people in a matter of seconds.

A word of caution – there are thousands of free and paid social media tools, so make sure you don’t over commit and rely entirely on tools.

5) Lists and Groups

Human beings are social animals and it’s understandable that they love to socialize – be it real life or in social media circles. The community aspect is a crucial part of all social networks. While Twitter thrives on lists, Facebook groups are increasingly gaining traction. It’s a great idea to use keyword searches to find Twitter lists and Facebook groups to gain access to a bunch of people who might be interested in your business offerings.

These five ways of locating and building target audiences with social media have worked wonders for me. If you’ve used any other ways to find people and locate your target audience with social media, please share your experience with us by leaving a comment below this post.