One of the most effective ways to ensure that a company is being successful in its online marketing efforts is to get traffic from the right audience, which means knowing who the target audience is in the first place. The target audiences are those people who will visit the company website/blog for advice and help with problems, this is the online community.
There are many tools available to help a business find their online communities here are two of them:
Backtype – searching for people and following them to see where they comment, looking for particular names or companies that are relevant to the audience and seeing who comments, then building a community from there, with people who have similar interests and business needs.
Tweet Reach – This allows people to follow someone on Twitter who is definitely active and shows what they are tweeting about. It enables someone to search for a particular phrase and find out who else is writing about this phrase, etc.
Targeting the wrong audience can lead to criticism and people not appreciating what the company is doing, finding the community online where the business fits in and is seen as the expert, means people will keep coming back for advice and updates.
What do you think?