Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3: Maximizing Stratified Social Communities

In This Chapter

• Valuing stratified social communities
• Making business connections online
• Searching for networks by industry, demographics, and activity type
• Examining geolocation services for Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook
• Organizing meet-ups and tweet-ups
• Starting a social coupon campaign

Social networking communities, like other marketing outlets, can be sliced and diced many ways. They can be sorted vertically by industry or horizontally by demographics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, education, or income. By doing a little research, you can stratify (classify) them according to other commonly used marketing segmentation parameters, such as life stage (student, young married, family with kids, empty nester, retired) or psychographics (beliefs or behaviors).

If you want to delve even further into niche sites, you can find social media channels that are driven by type of activity, geographical location, or by types of social offers. In this chapter, we discuss how you can find these smaller, niche sites and then how you can get value from them.

Making a Bigger Splash on a Smaller Site

Stratified sites may have much smaller audiences than sites such as Pinterest or Twitter. However, if you choose correctly, the users of these sites will closely resemble the profile of your typical client or customer, making them better prospects. Compare it to the difference between advertising at the Super Bowl versus distributing a flyer ...