How To Build Your Audience Strategy Before Your Social Media Strategy
By: Aj Vaden
Tags: Social Media Strategy, Personal Branding, Branding, Social Media Marketing, Brand Strategy

I was recently asked about the best way to repurpose content, or how to strategically create and post content online. I wanted to answer this in a video, because I have a feeling this is not the first, nor the last time, this question will arise.

To begin with, it can be different for everyone. You probably don’t hear that about content very often, but that’s the truth. Here’s a core belief of us at Brand Builders Group and of my own personally: content and your content (specifically when it comes to sharing on social media) isn’t about the platform as much as it is about the audience. So before we worry about your content strategy and your social media strategy, I want you to first be worried about who is your content built to serve.

Start by asking yourself some important questions.

What are your ideal audience’s demographics? What are the psychographics? Where do they spend time online and how do they want to hear from you and in what medium?

Do they want video? Do they want audio content, such as podcasts? Do they want quick social media blurbs, or do they prefer an hour-long video?

Do they want to see you? Do they want to hear you? Do they want to read?

What platforms are they spending time on? Is it YouTube? Is it Instagram? Is it Facebook? Is it LinkedIn? Is it Twitter? Is it Pinterest? Where are they?

I think you have to know the answer to those questions before you can even begin creating a content strategy or repurposing prior content.

Technically, you can create one thing and use it over and over again on each platform. You can take a video and deconstruct it, reconstruct it, and post it in all these different places. But there’s a lot more intentionality than that in successful social media strategy.

At Brand Builders Group, we have a proprietary formula that we’ve called the “Social Media Content Diamond”. This diamond demonstrates how you start with a video, and you completely deconstruct it.

You strip the audio, you strip the text, you turn it into infographics, you turn it into beautifully created graphics. You can even make it into a mini podcast so it works on all your platforms.

This is a very routine social media strategy that we teach to all of our clients. You can get tons of literature about that anywhere on our website at brandbuildersgroup.com.

However, there is a missing link that will keep this strategy from working for you if you haven’t answered the following question yet: where do you wish to spend your time? That answer should be based on: where does your audience spend their time?

I’ll let you in on something that is unique to me as an individual. I probably do most of my personal posting on Instagram, but I also know that when it comes to a strategic business effort, most of my audience lives on LinkedIn. For that reason, I don’t spend a lot of time personally surfing LinkedIn.

Nonetheless, that’s where my audience is. I know that if I’m going after XYZ, as my core target audience, that’s where they are if I want to find them. So even though it’s not my favorite platform to utilize for fun, it’s important that I can strategize and motivate and inspire through it, because that’s where my audience is.

We can get caught up in assuming that where we like spending our own time is where our audience is, but that’s not true. Everyone uses social media differently. So I have to be very intentional and strategic about the content that I curate and where I put it.

For this reason, I have to be intentional when I’m making videos and keep in mind that it needs to work on YouTube, on LinkedIn, and in all of these other places. When posting on YouTube, I know I need to be very “how-to” oriented versus what I put on LinkedIn, which is very much more oriented toward professional services, entrepreneurship and leadership, versus what I put on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, which is more social lifestyle, general improvement, or topic-specific for one conversation. It’s a lot!

These are all the moving parts I think influencers don’t talk about enough: who is the content for, and where are they spending time online compared to where you spend time online and where should you put more focus or less focus?

Now, I do know that there are really simple ways of repurposing content that save time, money and energy, and I’m a total advocate of that. I’m just also going to encourage you and challenge you that before you start worrying about your content strategy and your repurposing strategy, you focus on your audience first.

It’s amazing how the exact same content and the exact same posts will get dozens and dozens of shares and hundreds of likes in one place and only a few on another platform. The reason for that is because it resonates differently on different platforms. So before you stretch yourself thin on a general, overarching repurposing strategy, why not just map out your audience?

Where are they? Where do they spend time? What do they want to get from me? And through what medium do they want to get it from me? On which platform do I think it is most likely to succeed?

Once you have the answers to those questions, come back, listen to our podcasts (brandbuildersgroup.com/podcast), visit our website (brandbuildersgroup.com), and we will give you all the information you need on a repurposing strategy and a content strategy. Just keep in mind this challenge: first, know your audience and have an audience strategy. Then we can help you from there.