The Art and Science of Narrowcasting
We're told not to broadcast on social media channels. Don't just shout out a bunch of stuff and expect people to respond. Engage, connect, do a lot of buzzword-type things.But the true opposite of broadcasting is narrowcasting.
verb (used without object) [nar-oh-kast, -kahst]To aim a program or programming at a specific, limited audience or sales market.Origin: 1770–80, for an earlier sense; narrow (broad ) castSource: Dictionary.com
Beyond targeting your Facebook updates to be viewed only by people in a certain area, or doing some heavy targeting in paid ads on social channels, however, narrowcasting is all but ignored.That's because it takes time and takes work.We appear to have finally gotten past the point where we believe social media is free. But too many still don't seem to believe that social media is time-consuming. A few tweets here, a few Facebook posts there, and whammo! Instant traffic/sales/conversions/whatever. And if that doesn't happen right away, then there must be something wrong with the people managing the accounts. It can't be that expectations are unreasonable.If you're willing to spend the time to do the research, however, it's not extremely difficult to do - you just have to put in the time.Focus first on the people already connected to you. They connected with you for a reason, right? Figure out what that reason was. Find ways to reach out to them. Figure out what they want to talk about, what they want from you. And then talk to them, share appropriate content with them.There are a lot of tools you can use to achieve this.Knod.es and Nimble will do a great job at helping you analyze the people you're connected to, discover why they followed and what's going on in their lives. Nimble will also remind you to keep in touch. IFTTT and BufferApp can help automate some of the more tedious aspects of cutting-and-pasting URLs and scheduling what time you want to post certain things.My favorite IFTTT recipe, in fact, automatically moves content I save on Feed.ly to my Buffer account. Once it moves to Buffer, I clean up the text, add credit and choose what order I want them sent out in. I'm automating the little repetitive tasks that can be time sucks so I have more time to focus on the important things.Here's some more tips and suggestions, from a couple of previous presentations on the topic: