Do You Segment Your Social Bookmarking?

Market segmentation has been a major part of marketing for many decades. Do you apply the same principles to your online social marketing and through your social bookmarking?

According Wikipedia:

A market segment is a subgroup of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to have similar product needs….

and

Market segment is the processing of marketing of characterizing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in similar ways or have similar needs.

If you were to take this approach, your would break your potential social market into subsets depending on different characteristics. For example, if you marketed and sold pet food, you may break your market up into cat, dogs, birds and fish. To take advantage of this, you would need to change your social bookmarking and social marketing strategies.

You could set up different identities within each of the social sites; one identity for cat, another for dog; and so on. You would then only have the cat fanciers in your cat group. Now when marketing a particular product aimed at cats, you would be marketing to and audience made up entirely of can fanciers rather than an audience with a wide range of pets. You could then use your social bookmarks to identify information that is far better target; this should result in a much higher conversion rate for visitors.

Segmenting your market can be rather time consuming if you have a broad base that you are targeting. However, if you start by taking one segment at a time and optimizing your social marketing and social bookmarking to that segment, the returns could be much higher than what you see at present. Market segmentation and social marketing or social bookmarking can go hand in hand.