The United States of Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC]

For a great many internet marketers & SMB marketing departments with “nose-to-the-grindstone” like schedules & workloads, an often overlooked aspect of the social media marketing game, is analyzing how potential clients in differing regions may see your brand through social media and if the messaging you use doesn’t speak to the local vernacular, events of importance and usage habits, the value of your brand, product or service can be falling on deaf ears.

Obviously, to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock, Facebook is still the most dominant social platform in the U.S. But the simple truth of the matter is that not all marketers & business owners can enjoy the benefits of traveling to different parts of the country or spend extensive research time, in order to better-learn how people access social media, the frequency use and the volume of users for a given city or state. If your firm serves an area with relatively low social usage overall, platforms like Facebook, while still beneficial, may very well not be your primary customer engagement platform. In short, just because “everyone” is on Facebook, doesn’t mean your ideal client base is using Facebook to potentially find businesses like yours. Inversely, if yours is a brand with a huge potential for multi-region or nationwide clients & your not engaging those clients at the localized level, your social media marketing could definitely be improved upon. Even national brands see the benefit in geo-targeted messaging and information, as evidenced in Walmart’s localized Facebook campaign, from last year.

So, the million dollar question is, on what platform are the greatest concentration of potential new clients for your business? The logical follow-up to that question is will these potential new clients utilize any social media platforms, like Facebook, to find brands that meet a need they have? To answer that question, depends entirely on how well marketers & business owners are in tune with the ideal target demographics.

The infographic breaks down Facebook user stats by state, as well as some other potentially handy tidbits that could help social media marketers and business owners understand the “who”, “where” & “what to say” -type issues that can lead to an under-developed social media campaign, if left unanswered. This hearkens back to a simple rule, divulged the first week of English 101, and what we think should be the Golden Rule of social media marketing: “When writing anything, know your audience”…especially where they’re located!