When creating an online presence, it’s important to think about how you can better connect with your audience. Having an effective social website and direct-to-fan channel relies on getting to know the makeup of your fanbase and being able to contact them.
Why It Matters
You should regularly check out your membership data including email addresses and other demographic information to:
- communicate with and sell directly to your audience
- plan tours based on the geographic makeup of your audience
- get in touch with your fans by location
- sell projects by proving who and where your audience is
The more you know about who your audience is and where they are located, the easier it will be to engage with them based on location or interest. Targeted selling always does better than generic email blasts: you won’t have to work as hard at selling and you’ll have a bigger return on your efforts.
In addition to helping you market to your fans based on their location, geographic information about your fans can be used to plan future tours. You might not realize that you have a huge following – big enough to warrant a tour stop – in Omaha, Nebraska until you can gather the locations of your fans.
Limitations of Some Third Party Services
A lot of services will not provide external contact info of your fans or followers, like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Your only option for contacting your fans is through that service. We think all of these services are great, but it’s hard to justify using one of them as your main online presence if you cannot directly communicate with your fans by email. If you’re sticking to a Facebook Fan Page for your brand, you will not have automatic access to the email addresses of your fans. You can target fans of your Page based on location, but there’s no way for you to email them off of Facebook unless you integrate a third-party application that asks for your Fans’ email address such as a Wildfire contest app.
Gathering Membership Data
If you are planning to email your fans, it’s very important that they know this when they provide their email address so they’re not surprised. Ideally, they’re providing their email address to get on your email list or receive your weekly newsletter. It’s equally important that they can unsubscribe easily. We’ll be posting best practices of creating engaging emails and managing your email list soon.
We usually work with our clients to use a service that allows them to gather email addresses of their fans and other demographic information. Services like Ning and Topspin have built-in capabilities. Blog platforms such as WordPress usually allow you to require commenters to leave their email addresses, and most social network platforms include the ability to see and download member email addresses. Further, by adding Google Analytics to your site you can analyze your traffic and learn more about where your audience is. Finally, you can easily add a Mail Chimp widget for people to get on your email list to your blog or website.
Photo Credit: Your Fans by Sara Lafleur-Vetter on Flickr, licensed using Creative Commons
Reactions No Comments
Posted inSocial Media
