When preparing your content for social media updates and blog posts, it is worth considering who the audience is likely to be and preparing with them in mind.

Besides the natural target audience for your own industry, there are two kinds you should prepare for.  (Also see this post on our sister site – Social Media Solutions.  “There are two ways to be found online“)

Your ‘tribe’

Your tribe are your existing clients, customers, fans, followers, friends, connections, leads and prospects who are watching you and your posts.

You write for them to educate them, entertain and enlighten them, ensure that they understand your product or service and are using it to its fullest extent.

As they are your primary audience, your priority is to ensure that your posts meet their needs first.

If your content is good, then it is likely that these folks will forward it to others and your message will spread and your tribe will grow.

People who find you online

Your second audience are those people who find you without any direct action on your part.  Direct action would be if you reached out to them, sent them an email, added or invited them to follow you.

These people find you when they search for certain terms online and stumble across your posts, or see their friends commenting on social sites.

Writing for this audience is also important because you always need to be adding to your database as there is a constant turnover of followers and a healthy database should be growing all the time.

Preparing your content with this audience in mind means that you have to explain to them how your product, service or industry works; why it is important in their lives or business and what you can do for them.   Your posts should be rich with the kinds of key words and SEO that needs to be included so that they will find you and not your competitor.

It is unlikely that you can meet the needs of both groups in every post, so just bear it in mind when preparing and then you will be able to write different posts at different times to meet the relevant needs.