How to Convince Your Clients To Use Social Media

• Updated on: 2018-08-03
• Read original article here

As a marketing professional, one of your toughest challenges will be explaining to your clients why they need to be on social media.

While it’s great to boast about the standard social media factoids like 901 million active members on Facebook or 140 million active users on Twitter, your clients will need something that applies directly to them. Specifically, they need to know if they have a chance at being successful on social media.

Here are some ways to prove to your potential social media clients that their target audience is on social media.

The easiest way to convince your clients that they need to be on social media is by showing them that their competitors are not only on social media, but that they are successful.

Of course, you can’t show your client the competitor’s ROI unless you get lucky and find an interview or case study about the competitor and their social media strategy. But you can show them things like the competitor’s audience (Twitter followers and Facebook fans), the popularity of their videos (YouTube channel video views), and their social strength (Klout).

If you don’t want to just give them numbers, you can go a bit further to give them trends, demographics, and other useful information on specific networks.

TwitterCounter, for example, will let you show the competitor’s follower growth for a span of up to three months.

On Facebook, you can show the competitor’s public insights data by clicking on the number of likes for their page.

You should also look around their Facebook page to grab data such as their latest most popular status update based on number of likes and comments. Be sure to mention that Facebook offers advertising in the form of Promoted Posts which will make a page’s status update go further.

On YouTube, you can get additional public insights on the competitor’s most popular video and even show some basic demographics. Just click on the graph symbol next to the video’s number of views (when available).

This will show your client who likes the competitor’s videos, how popular they have been over time, and even some websites that feature the competitor’s videos.

On Klout, you can look show clients the topics the competitor is influential about on social media.

You can also see other users that the competitor engages with. This can give your client the opportunity to see the types of people they will also be engaging with.

But what if you can’t find this kind of information on their competitors because their competitors are as lost to social media as the client is?

Then you are going to have to take a different approach and show them that their target audience is on social media, waiting to engage with them. Here are some easy was to find a target audience on the top social networks.

When it comes to Twitter, your best bet is using Twitter search, search engines, and directories. Twitter Advanced Search will allow you to search for particular keywords that people are talking about. You can even use it to filter conversations happening in a specific location for local clients.

Follower Wonk will allow you to search for people with specific keywords in their bio. Using more options on your search will allow you to narrow people down by location.

If these two options do not get you enough information, you can also try Twitter directories like Wefollow and Twellow where Twitter users add themselves to topics they are interested in or that they tweet about.

There are two ways to find out if your client’s target audience is on Facebook. The first is through interest pages. Type in a keyword that would fit your client’s target audience in the search box. You should quickly be able to find a related Interest page that will show you the number of people who have listed that interest on their profile.

If that doesn’t work, you can also run numbers through Facebook advertising. Simply enter any URL as the destination for your “ad” and then skip down to the Choose Your Audience section. Here, you can enter the location, demographics, relationship status, education, workplaces, and precise interests or broad categories.

Once you have narrowed the field down, Facebook will actually show you the number of people it estimates that are on Facebook that match your criteria. Hence, it makes the perfect number to hand over to your clients!

With Google+, it’s hard to get an exact count of how many people are on their network that have a particular interest. The best you can do is use the search box to query a keyword, change the dropdown to People and pages, then view the results.

Trying to convince your client to use YouTube for a social and video marketing platform? You can use the YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool which will show you YouTube search volume for specific and suggested keywords.

Of course, don’t let the client forget that videos are not limited to YouTube – they come up in Google search results as well!

Once you show your client detailed information about their competitor or the potential audience they have on social media, your client will have less of an argument against using it for their online marketing campaign!