Identifying Social Channels

In this lesson we're going to talk about how to identify the right social channels. Once you've established a social strategy and you know your goals; you then need to determine which networks your going to pursue.

Major Networks

That could be major networks like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, or Twitter. These places have hundreds of millions of users with broad audience sets. Social networks can have a high impact, but they also may be noisy places where it's challenging to stand out from the crowd.

Medium Sized Networks

There are some second-level networks, like Tumblr and Pinterest, StumbleUpon, LiveJournal, Myspace, or Foursquare. These places are potentially a great place to start, but you need to figure out whether you're going to get value from them and if your audience is actually on the networks.

Small Networks

Then there are niche networks. These would be individual to your specific brand, industry, or to your niche audience. Some examples are Hacker News, Dribbble, deviantART, or Ravelry. Oh yeah, don't forget Inbound.org!

Where To Start

In order to determine which of these networks to pursue we really need to think about about where the audience exists. If they're not on the network that you're pursuing, it's probably not valuable to go there unless you're trying to reach an audience that will influence your audience.

Next, think about where can your company add value and drive interest? This is a challenging one for a lot of social media marketers, because they think about if they can simple participate there. The key is to truly add value to the network and drive interest in your brand.

Finally, where can you accomplish your marketing goals, either directly or indirectly? A lot of this stuff is going to be indirect, and it's this intersection right here where all three of these overlap. Make sure that network that you're targeting are answering your audience's questions.

Testing

After you figure out what networks to start with you can create a list, observe research, and test success. This means going in and seeing who is in that network and looking at their engagement with your content. What are they saying there? How do they participate and engage? You don't want to be very aggressive right from the start, but you do want to test the efficacy of the network.

ROI

Finally, evaluate the ROI. Just be careful to anticipate long cycles and a lot of indirect benefits from social media participation. For example you could be on Twitter as well as, participating on Ravelry when someone invites you to a conference that turns you into a business relationship that gets you a lot of coverage. Indirect benefits are common and can help your SEO plus give you content. These are tough to measure, but they need to be evaluated as part of this process.

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