You know the old expression, “The lights are on, but nobody’s home?” Sadly, this adage can sometimes apply to a brand-centric social media campaign. Perhaps you’ve made a conscious effort to develop and implement a full-blown social media campaign for your company or product, but you are still struggling to increase your Twitter followership or your Facebook likeability. There are myriad reasons as to why your campaign might not be working, but in some instances, it might not actually be your fault. The overarching reason may actually be the fact that your target audience does not actively utilize social media in a way that is going to drive the type of growth that you had hoped for.

Your company may be very successful, but your clientele may not be very interested in following or liking your company. And in some cases, your audience may not even be engaged on social media at all. Take Dove’s Men+Care brand. The brand has been struggling to gain traction on social media sites, not because of the product or the campaign, but because the target demographic (men 30-49 years old) is somewhat disengaged with the various social media tactics that have been employed on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

It’s important to ask yourself a few questions when creating the goals of your social media campaign:
1. Who is your target audience? (Note: you should already know this as a business owner)
2. Is this audience engaged in social media? If so, which platforms do they utilize?
3. What type of content do they find compelling? (deals, industry news, etc.)

Try to answer these questions as objectively as possible in order to set realistic goals for your campaign and to build feasible objectives. It’s possible that your brand may benefit from a rich mix of public relations, traditional advertisements and professionally driven social media like LinkedIn vs. sharing sites such as Twitter and Facebook. A social media campaign with minimal followers paired with weak content can sometimes disengage customers and prospects and can do more harm than good.
Targeting your audience is rule A1 when it comes to building a communications campaign, but it also takes just the right balance to ensure that the campaign will reach this audience. Domus has helped clients of all sizes evaluate their communications objectives to produce campaigns that are effective and impactful. Learn more about our services at www.domusinc.com.
Greg Smore is a Senior Account Manager at Domus, Inc., a marketing communications agency based in Philadelphia. For more information, visit http://www.domusinc.com. For new business inquiries, please contact CEO and founder of Domus, Inc. Betty Tuppeny at betty.tuppeny@domusinc.com or 215-772-2805.