Marketing Trends: Stay Current or Fall Behind

As marketers, we must be learning constantly. Our target markets are always changing because of shifts in our culture, technology, and the way people prefer being marketed to. And if you’re not keeping your eyes open for the latest news on social media demographics and behavior, you might be missing out.

If I haven’t convinced you yet, look at Oxygen Media’s latest study about women and Facebook. Sure, you have to sift through the findings and deal with the sobering reality that 42% of women think it’s OK to post drunken photos of themselves. But there is one big piece of information that jumps out at me in this Mashable article: one-third of women aged 18-34 check Facebook first thing in the morning. That’s before they even brush their teeth or go to the bathroom. 21% check Facebook in the middle of the night.

Let’s say women aged 18-34 make up part of your target market—what do you do with this information? For starters, maybe you should experiment with a few Facebook updates from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. If you haven’t noticed on your news feed, there aren’t many people on Facebook at that time, so you have a perfect opportunity to be at the top of your fans’ feeds first thing every morning.

You can take this and apply it to any other demographic data you come across: read it, figure out what it might mean to you, and then experiment. The great (and frustrating) thing about social media is that there is no magic formula for getting traffic. But with things like this recent study, you can get a glimpse in to the mind of your target market.