Welcome to getting started with writing for social media writing to your reader. My name is Samantha Kay Ricky. I'm a freelance writer, and author and an instructional coach. In this lesson, lesson one, we're going to think about getting to know our audience. So what I'd like you to do is to grab a piece of paper and draw the outline of a person, it could be a stick figure, if you like. Or it could look something like the image that's about to come up on your screen.
This is your audience. And we're going to be thinking about two things. The why and the who, the who's pretty easy. These are the demographics. These are things like gender, age, education, socioeconomic status, religion, and ethnicity. The psychographics are more important because this is how we figure out how our audience is going to make decisions about our product, brand message or whatever it may be.
These are things such as their values and interest. their personality and lifestyle, their self perception, and most importantly, what will get our audience to take action. So take a few minutes and fill out the information on your paper thinking about the demographics and the psychographics. Hopefully you have a little bit of insight into who you're already targeting, but this can help you get a little bit more specific. So take a few minutes to do that. Once you have your audience in mind, you can either leave your picture just like the sample that's above, next to your computer or you could even grab a post it and write the following message.
My business stands for blank and we are speaking to blank. Leave this post it and your picture if you want on your computer and refer to it every single time you're ready to post. This will help you stay a little bit more specific and thinking about who you're speaking to. Once you know your audience, respect them, your audience wants validation that they are perceived in a certain way your posts can make them feel good about themselves and reinforce how they perceive themselves. If it does, that they're more likely to comment and share with their followers. Also, keep in mind you only want to share what your audience will be interested in.
Now this doesn't mean that you can't get personal once in a while. I think it's important that our audience also feels comfortable with us and thinks about us as a friend. Someone that they actually know. But make sure that what you're sharing is of interest to your audience because they're not only going to stop scrolling if they find something that grabs their attention. Here's another example of a poster that you could use instead of the one previously mentioned. I'm writing to blank, they are interested in blank, they value blank and they take action when blank.
Keeping this in mind is also another way to be very specific every time you post to social media. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about finding your voice