How do you know if your audience is using social media and how do you reach them without being intrustive?

I love your sensitivity to your audience and not being “intrusive” or inappropriate.

Firstly, even though you are not in a position to undertake a major research exercise, is there a survey that you are undertaking for another purpose that might have room for an extra question or two about social media?

If direct research is not a possibility, then some intuitive assumptions are needed.

For example, you could match your known audience demographic with the known demographics of the most popular social media tools, using publicly available statistics such as the Pew Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009 report ( http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/17-Twitter-and-Status-Updating-Fall-... ) or local blogs such as First Rate’s at http://www.firstrate.co.nz/blog/new-zealand-facebook-data-ppc-facebook-a... . From these statistics you can gain a fairly good idea as to which of your identified audience segments are fairly likely to be using online social networking tools.

It is important that you also become a user of these tools yourself - so to join Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, YouTube etc. From this vantage point you can sign up for similar arts organisations’ pages and groups, view their friends and members and get a very good sense of which type of people are signing up and making use of the tool in an arts context.

Although setting up a social media page or group is not something to be taken lightly, it is in fact a fairly low-risk tactic to implement. What I mean is, you don’t have to pay any up-front development costs in order to go live. So you can trial the tool that you think might be relevant to your audience and see what the response is.

Remember too, that you are not forcing anyone to follow or befriend you on social media. So if you give your broader audience the option to sign up (using your existing channels to advertise your social media pages), then it is up to them to make the move. If they’re not ready, they won’t sign up. But if you have done your informal investigations it is likely that you have made a fairly intuitive guess and are likely to hit the mark.

Social networking is all about defining who you are and sharing it with the world. So your audience members will be proud to display online that they are associated with you.

In terms of fear of being intrusive; it’s about how you use social media. It will become intrusive if you use it to overtly promote yourself and repeat your usual selling messages in another medium. And your followers will vote with their feet – they’ll simply “de-friend” you.  Social media is about listening to your audience and enabling them to connect with each other, and with you, in a way that adds value to their lives. Be careful to provide information that assists or intrigues them, and to enable the conversation to happen naturally without too much interference from you.

Take these approaches and you’ll be onto a winner.