Last month Entrepreneur Magazine reported that women are more social media focused than their male counterparts! With women much more likely to follow celebrities and brands online, but men outweigh women in looking at sports online.
The article, which was based on the latest State of The Media report by Nielson, saw women have more social networking profiles and are much more likely to purchase products they have seen featured online or on TV than men. This isn’t to say that men don’t use social media and in most cases in the report, males follow females only by a few decimal points.
But what does this mean for business marketing? Should we start to make our online marketing practices more female friendly? Or do we just make sure we have all bases covered? We work tirelessly to interact with our audiences, and now more than ever, companies are striving to use social media to interact with customers as marketing budgets are squeezed to the maximum. So what is the best way to address this study and how can we make sure we are targeting the right people in the right way?
Although Facebook and Twitter dominate the social media scene, it is evident that with women having multiple social platforms that you need to have multichannel marketing practices in place, you cannot focus all your activities in one area otherwise you will miss huge profiles of customers.
If women are more likely to follow a brand or a celebrity, if your budget allows, can a celebrity endorse your brand? Or can you run a competition to enhance your brand’s presence and get your name out there? In conjunction with this, it is important to have brand existence on and offline as there is more chance of people engaging with you on social media platforms if they see you offline.
But what about men? How do you target the masses, well it is still fair to say that there are a lot of men online and on social media platforms, we just need to target them properly, men are much more likely to look up TV information whilst watching the show, and they far outweigh women when looking at sport on social media.
The main thing to consider is research your audience, know what they want and how to get in touch with them and when. Remember to constantly ask the question – what do my customers want from social media and how can you make sure you are in the right place at the right time to make sure you target them effectively?
