Are #Csuite Executives the Snow Leopards of Social Media
The snow leopard of the Himalayas is a powerful and rare creature with almost mythical status amongst wildlife photographers and conservationists. Active only at dawn and dusk in some of the most remote and forbidding terrain on the planet, the elusive but beautiful big cat doesn’t make it easy for those wanting to study and protect them.
Savvy naturalists use predictive methods to identify the best locations to place camera “traps”: known areas where snow leopards travel and remote watering holes where they drink. Without a strategy, they would have a poor chance of finding their clandestine subject.
Capturing a glimpse of the snow leopard sounds a bit like capturing a hard to reach target audience on social media, doesn’t it?
The C-Suite: Sought After Social Media “Snow Leopards”
The most in demand social personas social marketers want to identify are those who occupy the C-Suite: CEO’s, CMO’s, CTO’s & CIO’s. These business leaders are sought after for good reason. They are the decision makers with the power to say YES, or at the very least, strongly influence purchase decisions and vendor selection within their companies.
Identifying and engaging with this select group could be game-changing for your business, but the question is how?
By taking a few pages out of the snow leopard photo-trap playbook, you can not only find your C-Suite targets with predictability but also find them with scale!
Looking For The C-Suite On Social? Go To Where They “Drink”
No, we are not talking about the lobby bar of the Four Seasons Hotel, although you might find more than a few interesting C-Suiters there!
When trying to find elusive social media targets, remember the key strategy of our snow leopard hunters: set your “traps” in places with a high degree of probability of your target audience showing up.
In social media, those “places” can be industry-related hashtags, thought leaders they engage with, and the ultimate “trap” of all: content sources.
The Ultimate C-Suite Trap: “Link-Listening” From Content Sites
One of the most powerful social listening strategies any business can employ is to monitor the Tweets containing links from specific content sources. Because certain types of content attracts specific types of people, one can make predictive assumptions about who is going to show up and share that content through social media. Capturing people sharing content links on Twitter hands down yield some of the highest quality audience. Bots don’t share content off web sites. Real people do, and its the ultimate hand raising and self-identification to target them.
When considering our CEO persona, business publications like the Wall Street Journal and Forbes are perfect places to set our listening “traps”. A recent analysis of Tweets containing content originating from both sites (over a 5 day measurement period) bore this out. To capture our C-Suite’rs, we set up a SocialQube listening project that captured every Tweet containing a wsj.com, forbes.com or LinkIN.com link in them, and then filtered for the term “CEO” in bio. Combined, we analyze almost 74,400 Tweets to get the results below.
We identified 23,000 people sharing LinkIN.com links and databased 5,200 CEO’s sharing content over a 2 week period. We were also able to capture 1,200 self-identified as “Founders”, 441 as “entrepreneurs and we captured 219 CMO’s in a searchable social database.
That type of predictability could allow a business to create a specific and forecastable engagement strategy with this highly desirable audience, and measure it against other marketing efforts.
Who Are Your Social Media Snow Leopards?
Every business or brand has its own “snow leopards”: influencers, industry experts, and super fans. Refer to your snow leopard photo-trap playbook to capture them with predictability and scale:
- Identify the places your social snow leopards go to “drink”: industry hashtags, thought leaders, and content sources.
- Set the ultimate “traps”: link-listening from content sites.
Empower your business to create targeted communications that connect with relevance and good intent!
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