In part 1 of this series, we made the case that a high “reach” – the amount of people you reach via your social media efforts, does not mean a high “impact”, unless your audience is your actual target audience.
So how can we do better? Well, follow four steps:
1. Identify your target group
2. Inventorize your target group’s social media channels
3. Interact with your target groups
4. Measure your impact
Vanessa -CCAFS- Meadu
During our “web presence day” at the CGIAR communications workshop, Vanessa Meadu from CCAFS volunteered as a test case.
As the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, CCAFS surely makes an interesting case in defining a strategy aimed at a high impact.
Any organisation that takes its web presence seriously, should define its target audience. Unless you define your target audience, your web presence will be a mere “shout in the void”. And putting it bluntly, if your target group is twelve-year-old youngsters, your web design and content will be drastically different if your target senior scientists, no?
For CCAFS, we defined the following target groups:
A pretty easy exercise, no? That was the “thinking part”. Now comes the “sweat part!”.
In the old times, media and PR people collected fax numbers of their target audience so they could send them press releases. Well, in these modern times, we do exactly the same. Except that, now, we work with their social media channels. So, high time to fill our “Social Media Filofax” with data!
In the case of our example, the CCAFS team knew the key players for each of their target groups. So for each of them, we will now fill up our database with all their social media channels. Where are they on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube? What are their blogs?
And because these are all “social media channels”, we also look at the people whom our target audience “be-friend” or “follow”, or by whom they were “be-friended” or “followed” in turn.
As an example, it is pretty easy to follow the followers of another Twitter account. Is the Gates Foundation one of your current or potential donors, working in your target area? Well then:
And do the same for every single Twitter account you find for your target group.
Now do the same stuff for every single person/organisation in your target group, and for all of their social media channels.
I told you, this was going to be “sweat”!
Once you have those long lists of where your target audience hangs out in Social Media Land… it is time to… paaaartyyyy!
What do you do on social media? Right, you interact!! No use to have 2,000 Twitter followers if you keep dead silent on Twitter. So start tweeting those links you find interesting, tweet your news bulletins, retweet interesting stuff…
After a few weeks, it’ll be time to check who in your target audience is following you back. You missed some? Send them a reply on Twitter: “Hey @Gatesfoundation – we’re finally on Twitter, and we got stuff you are interested in!”.
What always works out well, is if you can find out who physically manages social media for your target audience. For large organisations and donors, often it’ll be a dedicated person, sitting at the buttons of the Twitter and Facebook accounts. Send these people an email, introducing yourself. Network with them, and their social media friends. Those people have raw social media power at their finger tips.
You follow a similar approach for blogs. Start following updates of all the blogs from your target audience. Leave regular comments. Ask questions on their blogs. Get to know the actual blogger. Once you have interesting content on your blog, send them an email and ask them if they would like to publish a summary of your post. Or even better, if they could put in a link to your blog in their blogroll. Check if they’d accept a guest post from you. Do whatever, but please… INTERACT…!
After a few months, your social media channels should be buzzing, so time for part 4:
“Nice figures! But what difference does it make?”, your boss rightfully said. But, now, we have done it differently. This time, we are sure our target audience is following our social media channels, we are also sure that our “reach” is targeted. If people in our target audience read our blog posts, our reference documents on our website, read and retweet our Twitter links, leave comments and “Likes” on Facebook, etc… then we converted “reach” into “impact”.
Because your social media channels are now filled with people amongst your actual target audience, it is time to start measuring the actual buzz you get from that target audience.
Draw the same statistics you used to, but relate them to your target audience. Just a few examples:
And now, ladies and gentlemen, we are ready to answer our boss on his question. Our answer is now: “These figures represent not only how much our content was read by the general public, but also by our target audience!”.
Congratulations, you have turned “Reach” into “Impact”.
You can collect your raise now 
Picture and icons courtesy ILRI/MacMillan, IconFinder, Peter Casier and Totally Bike
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Peter – thanks for writing this up. It was an insightful session and you’ve given us some great ideas about how to tweet/blog/etc more effectively. I’m sharing this with my team!
Vanessa
Happy you liked the session, Vanessa. Keep on the good work on CCAFS..!
Dear peter,
A tough follow-up follow-up question: How do we deepen impact, and measure it? Just because one a ‘key player’ retweeted a link to a publication, does not necessarily translate to ‘impact’ as conceived in the science or development world. How else can we assess and value social media impact? Tracking publications downloads is one, but how can else can I explain the the value of conversations, mentions, and retweets to skeptics and directors who are not familiar with social media?
Vanessa
Ah, that is the million dollar question that goes for a lot of our work, not only confined to social media. It goes also for the “traditional media” as well as for all the technical publications and research we put “out there”.
If we publish a scientific report on a new crop improvement, what is the impact if that report is read by 100 targetted people?
I think, as media people, our job is to reach our core public, both with “traditional” and “social” media. The actual “change” this instills, can only be measured in real life, I guess.