Social media marketing tools

Social Strategy: Know your target audience

Thanks to Forrester Research for developing this tool to determine the mix of your perspective audience in social media. It’s based on Forrester’s Social Technographics® consumer classification model.

Social Media Path subscribes to this model as a tool for understanding your target audience. Our business is based on building social strategy by first examining customer behavior. The result is clear expectations and better customer relationships.

Features of this profile:

For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation (8 slides) or read Chapter 3 of Groundswell
Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.
The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.
The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.
The message “No data available” appears when you request a profile for which Forrester survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to “Not specified”.

Basic Social Media Tool Flow

Bringing Social Media Path to life has come with some interesting challenges – like my plugin breaking on the “classes” page in Internet Explorer. Despite the challenges in ramping up to site launch, much of my thinking has been focused around what and how to teach in our upcoming webinars. The bit-more-than-basic-how-to class “Social Media Fast Start” is an opportunity to enable beginners on a path of knowing their customers better. As the desire of business to market through connecting and sharing online grows, likewise does the confusion and feeling of being overwhelmed.

So, my mantra through course development continues to be, “How can I make online marketing and community development easier to do and to manage?”

I developed this model, which I’ll be discussing in detail in class. I’m interested in any comments. I realize there can be an unlimited number of complex interactions between tools, platforms and technologies. That’s what makes it the web right? I left widgets and applications off the model in consideration of my prospective class audience. I’m sure there are more tools that are not occurring to me. Care to add something?