
Whom are you addressing in your tweets? Can they tell you’re tweeting to them? Try addressing your audience in your tweets and micro-posts.
When people look at a column of your tweets, can they tell who the intended audience is?
When they land on your Facebook page, can they scan your posts and figure out whether you’re talking to them or to the other half-billion people in the Face-sphere?
We expect that our followers in social media know something about us and our brand, and will be receptive to our tweets. If you’re Souplantation, you can assume that visitors know you’re making offers to hungry people, most of whom have hungry families to feed.
Addressing the envelope
But suppose you’ve been developing and writing to buyer personas, as Michele Linn and David Meerman Scott have enjoined you to do all these years. You put in place a content marketing campaign aimed at your ideal readers, then use tweets and posts to point them to it.
Are you making it drop-dead easy for them to know that you’re talking to them?
Are you addressing the envelope?
Sacrifice a few precious characters in the name of targeting. For example:
- Sysadmins: Security holes in Windows 7; plug ’em now http://… #hashtag
- MobileAppDevelopers: Still time to register for devconf at http://…
- Mktgmgrs: You tweetin’ to me? Huh? http://… #hashtag1 #hashtag2
- AngryBirders: Two new cheats revealed http://…
- navyseals: Thanks, good job. Don’t tell us – we don’t want to know how you did it
What happens when you don’t address the envelope like this? People assume you’re talking to your “following” – whatever that is – but what about those of us who don’t yet know whether we’re in your following?
Explicitly addressing your tweets and posts is an easy way of qualifying the members of your audience and letting them know whom you’re trying to attract to your following. If I’m not a mktgmgr, sysadmin or navyseal, then I know your message doesn’t apply to me.
And we all appreciate anything you can do to help us cut through the clutter.
*(With apologies to Robert DeNiro as Travis in “Taxi Driver”)
photo credit: sludgegulper