Our Social Media Journey - Part 2

Starting this project from scratch, my first step was research. I needed to understand who our current audience is (so I can target them better), whether our social media audience matches our customer profile (to ensure we're on the right track), and what others are doing in our field.

Research

I began by exploring Facebook Insights, which provides data on our Facebook page's performance and audience breakdown.

The insights revealed that most of our audience are women aged 35–44 based in the UK, followed by women aged 45–54 and then 25–34. This aligns well with our ‘average customer’ profile.

I decided to ignore the Potential Audience section, as it seems primarily geared towards selling ads (which isn't our focus). The metrics also don't align with what we already know about our audience. While Facebook states these figures are estimates, I feel they don’t fully understand our market. However, it is interesting to note that it predicts our audience has interests in cooking, BBC News, and Ant & Dec!

What Others Are Doing

Next, I explored what other businesses are doing with their social media posts, focusing on the dance industry – both suppliers and consumers. Honestly, I was disappointed with most suppliers; dance schools generally seem to have a stronger online presence.

There were a few recurring issues across both groups:

• No clear message or design
• Lack of personality in content

We’re guilty of this too.

At Costume Source, we love to showcase our personality – it’s a key part of who we are and helps build trust and connection with our customers. While our messaging often reflects this, our social media doesn’t quite hit the mark. When someone visits our Facebook page, they should immediately get a sense of who we are as a company and the people behind it.

This is an area we need to improve, and I’ll be sharing more on this in future updates.

Emoji

Part of my research involved running A/B tests on our Facebook posts (following the instructions here) to see if emojis impact engagement. I’d read several articles suggesting they do, but I wanted to verify this myself.

Each post had two versions: one with emojis and one without. The content remained the same, and half the audience saw the emoji version while the other half saw the plain version.

The results were staggering – posts with emojis saw 86% more engagement compared to those without. I wasn’t expecting such a significant difference!

Key Takeaways

So, what did I learn this week, and how can you apply these insights to your own social media strategy?

• Identify who your audience is.
• Ensure your posts are relevant to your audience – avoid generic content.
• Let your personality shine through in your posts.
• Include emojis!

Next Week

Next week, I’ll dive into more practical tasks – actually posting! As always I’ll share what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and the results.

Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram to stay updated and see what’s happening!