Your Guide to Social Media Targeting Via Sprout

These days, everyone is a publisher. Brands, consumers, businesses and agencies alike are creating digital content at a speed that far outpaces our ability to consume these messages. As Steve Rubel, Chief Content Strategist at Edelman, puts it: “The digital content ecosystem, I’ve come to believe, is like the night sky. There are thousands of stars all vying for our attention. Yet few or none truly stand out.”

Many attempt to solve this problem strictly with creativity. While creativity helps, it turns out that another way to win attention in noisy social media feeds is by being highly relevant . And with more and more content filling our various feeds, it’s becoming increasingly important that you get your posts in front of the right segments of your overall audience. As such, audience targeting has become a necessary and effective component of a successful social media publishing strategy.

Of course, when paying to promote a piece of content, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn provide extremely robust targeting capabilities that enable publishers to refine their intended audience through a bevy of demographic, user type and interest-level categories. However, social media targeting is not a strategy that should be solely supported by advertising dollars .

Luckily, most social networks allow publishers to apply some level of targeting or custom visibility to organic posts. Setting custom visibility through targeting criteria available via Sprout Social can increase engagement rates and provide a more relevant experience by delivering content that’s tailored specifically to certain segments of your audience.

For ease of use, click on any of the links below to jump to the platform you wish to explore, and learn how Sprout can help you reach the right audience:

• Facebook Audience Targeting
• LinkedIn Audience Targeting
• Google+ Audience Targeting
• Twitter Audience Targeting

Accessing Audience Targeting From Compose

Sprout’s publishing tools make it easier than ever to schedule, queue and post messages to multiple networks simultaneously and leverage unique social media targeting options for each individual network—all from a single intuitive Compose window.

This is really powerful. Not only does Compose centralize your social media publishing efforts, saving you time and ensuring a consistent voice across networks, but it also allows you to deliver the most relevant messages to targeted segments of your communities on each network .

To access the Audience Targeting options, simply click the globe icon in the lower left corner of the Compose window. The menu will intelligently populate with only the networks that correspond to the profiles to which you have selected to publish.

Sprout’s Audience Targeting capabilities are available to all Sprout users in all plan types, from Deluxe to Enterprise. If publishing targeted messages is part of your social media publishing strategy, no matter the size of your team or the audience you’re trying to reach, Sprout can help you achieve your goals.

Facebook Audience Targeting

The Facebook News Feed has become a crowded space. With the ever-changing Edgerank algorithm, ensuring a healthy reach on your organic posts can feel like a constant battle. While it may seem counterintuitive, one effective method for maximizing the organic reach of your posts is to target them to a smaller, more relevant segment of your audience.

While targeting by user type or interest-based criteria can be effective in creating and testing Facebook ads, by the nature of these inputs, there is still a possibility that you are introducing some subjectivity into your refinements. To that end, Sprout’s Facebook Audience Targeting criteria focus on two of the most objective, clear-cut audience attributes: language and location.

From Sprout, Facebook targeting can be applied to posts based on the following criteria:

• Country
• State/Province
• City
• Language

When selecting any of the above, you can simply start typing the name of the desired target, and Sprout’s look-ahead smart search will refine the options in the dropdown menu, making it easy to find what you need.

The following are a few scenarios where language and location targeting can be applied:

• Posting regional content, such as location-specific promotions or events
• A/B testing the popularity of a product in specific locations
• Publishing translated posts to targeted subsets of a global audience

Keep in mind that language and location targeting will apply to the visibility of your Facebook posts across all of Facebook. This means that a Facebook fan who falls into the targeted segment for a specific post will be able to view that post in their News Feed, via Facebook search and while visiting your Page directly.

LinkedIn Audience Targeting

LinkedIn has come a long way from being a repository of digital resumes. Today, LinkedIn represents a thriving community of professionals looking to make deeper connections with their peers; it also serves as a robust publishing platform with vast amounts of content.

As the overall LinkedIn community has grown—now, more than 364 million members across 200 countries—it has become increasingly important to ensure that your content reaches the right people at the right time. Publishing targeted updates is an effective way to communicate with your LinkedIn followers in a more relevant and personal way.

From Sprout, LinkedIn targeting can be applied to posts based on the following criteria:

• Company size
• Industries
• Function
• Seniority
• Continents
• Countries
• State/province
• City

Applying audience targeting using the criteria outlined above will enable you to segment your LinkedIn followers and deliver content that is tailored specifically to subsets of your overall follower base. For example:

• Use seniority or job function targeting to share a job posting with relevant candidates.
• Share regionally specific company news or information about local industry events, using geography and industry targeting.

Download our free guide, “LinkedIn Targeting: Delivering Relevant Content to the Right People,” for actionable insights on how to best align your audience targeting strategy with your overall business objectives.

Google+ Audience Targeting

While Google+ may not provide the same level of demographic or interest-based targeting as Facebook or LinkedIn, it does enable you to create your own custom audience segments in the form of Circles. When leveraged properly, Circles offer a unique and powerful opportunity for executing targeted social media publishing.

Within Sprout, Audience Targeting for Google+ publishing enables you to set the visibility of your posts to include any individual or combination of the default post options (Public, Your Circles, Extended Circles) plus any custom Circles which you create.

However, keep in mind that when posting to multiple Google+ Pages at the same time, your Audience Targeting will be limited to the default options of:

• Public
• Your Circles
• Extended Circles

Twitter Audience Targeting

The Twitter community is very much a global one, and in many ways, the platform has been central to breaking down barriers and opening up the free flow of communication—even across borders. At the same time, certain scenarios call for more targeted messaging, such as publishing regionally relevant content. Geotargeting organic Tweets can be leveraged to create better experiences for local audiences .

From Sprout, Twitter targeting can be applied to Tweets based on the following criteria:

• Country

A few examples of effective Twitter geotargeting by country include:

• A multinational business maintains individual Twitter handles for each market in which it operates; however, it recognizes that the main corporate handle has the largest follower base. This business can leverage geotargeted Tweets from the corporate handle to reach local audiences that may not follow the regional handles.
• A global brand produces and shares content in several different languages from its main brand Twitter handle. To avoid alienating followers to which localized content may be irrelevant, the brand uses geotargeted Tweets to reach native speakers.

It’s important to note that any Tweet published with geotargeting applied will only be visible to users in that country—whether they are viewing their home feed or visiting the Twitter account’s page directly.

Bonus: Reach a Targeted Audience Through Advocates

There’s no doubt that leveraging audience targeting is an effective way to refine your social media publishing strategy. That said, it’s certainly not the only way to ensure that your messages are organically reaching the right audience. A carefully crafted employee advocacy program enables you to tap into a unique and powerful targeted community: your employees and their trusted networks. Similar to audience targeting, employee advocacy represents another strategy to reach a highly relevant audience and, when executed effectively, can have a meaningful impact on the overall spread of your brand’s content.

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