Tips on segmentation

How can I reach my ideal audience in Instagram? How can I segment my reach with Social Media Plus?

Step 1: Identify your target market

Before you start, you first need to know: Who is my target market?
Your target market can be defined as the group of people who need or want what you have to offer, which makes them more willing to consume your products, services or content.

E.g. If you’re selling ladies shoes, your target market will be women, not men -thus, your goal should be to contact the largest amount of women possible. If, on the other hand, you are a League of Legends streamer, your target market will be everyone who knows and plays LoL (not Overwatch, nor WoW, etc.), and your goal should be to reach to these players and invite them to follow you.

Step 2: Find out where this public is

Once you have defined your target market, you must ask yourself: “how can I find this customer base?” With Social Media Plus, you have 3 ways to locate them: hashtags, locations, and user accounts. We will explain each of these options, and provide you with some useful tips for you to tap into each option’s full potential.

1.- Hashtags: By selecting this kind of segmentation, your account will interact with all of the people who use the hashtags you specify. This means that, if you place the tag “shoes” on this section, then you will be sending likes, comments and/or follows to everyone who has made a publication under that tag. 

IMPORTANT: In Social Media Plus, hashtags are NOT written using the “#” symbol. 

TIP: Before using any hashtag, ask yourself: “Who uses these hashtags: my customers or my competition?” E.g. We attended the case of a customer who has a baby clothing store. For her segmentation, she was using hashtags such as #babyclothing, #babyclothes, #kidsfashion, etc., and she wasn’t getting the best results, because those hashtags were mainly used by other baby clothing stores to tag their merchandise. That is: she had configured her account to interact with her competitors, but not with her potential customers. Her solution was to do some research and find out the hashtags mothers were using, so she could reach them and offer them clothes for their babies. She also used the user accounts filter, which we will explain next.

2.- User accounts: If you select this kind of segmentation, the platform with generate interactions based on the attributes of the user accounts you pick. You can use any of the 4 following attributes:

• Their followers

• The people they follow

• People who like the photos uploaded by these accounts

• People who comment on the photos uploaded by these accounts

For example: in the case of the girl with the baby clothing store, she used this tool and used different Instagram accounts (also baby clothing stores) as reference for her segmentation. She enabled the option to interact with their followers, which basically put her in direct contact with her competitor’s customers. In this way, she 100% ensured to reach people who usually buy from and follow stores such as hers. You can do the same: whether you sell jewelry, shoes, furniture, etc., you can use accounts of stores doing the same as you as automatic reference to interact with people who follow them, like them or comment on their posts. In the same manner, if you are a small video game streamer, you can reference the accounts of larger streamers to contact their followers.

3.- Locations: If you select this kind of segmentation, your account will interact with all of the people who have uploaded a photo or video tagged on the places you specify. TAKE NOTE: We do not handle real-time information of these users’ locations. That is, we cannot tell you where are they at the moment: you can only interact with people who have tagged the location in any of their posts.

For example: If your shoe store is on Baker Street and there is another, larger shoe store on the same street, you can use the name of that store as a filter. This will put you in touch with all of the people who have uploaded a post from that location. In this way, you know you are interacting with people who may go to Baker Street, who likes buying shoes, and who may be interested in visiting your store. This is very useful for businesses with a physical store, which not necessarily make online transactions or deliveries.

It is important to notice that each segmentation option works independently from the others. That is, even though more than one option may be active simultaneously, each segmentation option will throw its own independent results -you cannot “stack filters” between segmentation options.