Mapping

When it comes to social media, the act of mapping is the business of figuring out what is going on with your target audience. That is, demographic information and digital behavior on the platforms you are most concerned with. But even more importantly, what businesses are mapping these days with social media is how their ideal consumer interacts online.

This means not only the top-down portrait of who the audience is, but also a kind of ethnography that shows how the audience member moves through the online world. This immersive understanding is necessary to construct a social media strategy that has any hope of succeeding in influencer marketing and content marketing. Platform-specific maps can be drawn, of course.

But there are also ways to see the platforms in relation to one another and to understand the kinds of trajectories that are possible for both influencers and audience members across them. Finally, all these insights can be fed back into a more schematic understanding of the way socially organized information behaves in general, using the framework of your specific business model as a kind of litmus test.