This is part of a little series of posts about blogs, social media and search best practices.

The article deals with “topical categorization” for social media audiences and beyond.

In essence the post is not just about categories you assign or topics you choose.

It’s mainly about the interests of your audience and how you serve them.

You have to put the right content into the right container.

You don’t want the warm winter coats get sent to hot central Africa.

How to serve different audiences

Ask yourself when creating and popularizing content on your site:

• What are your faithful visitors interested in?
• What do searchers look for?
• What do you want casual social media visitors to discover?

As you probably know social media can be a great source of valuable traffic when you know how to use it.

A key factor in making people visit your site, stay there, and appreciate your content is the audience you choose to cater to.

You want to offer the right content for the right people, not just getting “huge traffic” and annoying 90% of them.

Thus you want to match audience and content by deciding upfront what and how to write.

Dealing with too many choices

The Web and social media in particular offer an overwhelmingly large number of content choices.

With the AI slop flood we get inundated with redundant content.

There are far too many pieces to view, watch or read!

Yes, I’ve been using the Web since 1997, that’s like 30 years!

Over the decades the sheer number of content pieces trying to get your attention has been ever growing.

One of the best ways to deal with that constant onslaught is to only look for certain topics.

Audiences are often interested in one specific topic or a few at best.

This is the more true for business users. Sometimes even more!

A large number will only care for UX, a few may seek out CRO advice, many others just look for content on SEO.

When dealing with too many choices most people just limit their number. How?

They reduce cognitive load by simply narrowing the scope of content they are looking at.

Categorize yourself accordingly and you’ll be seen. Otherwise nobody will even venture beyond your headline.

In this short post I want to help bloggers, social media and search marketers. How?

I want to suggest categories they can use for their posts.

The best fitting audience interests for this blog are probably:

1. Marketing
2. Business
3. Writing
4. Blogging
5. Search
6. Web development
7. Internet

Ideally I tell people upfront what I am talking about. That way they can quickly decide to stay or move on.

When they notice the thing they are looking for or are interested in right away they are more likely to remain on your site.

Otherwise visitors might bounce without taking any significant action!

Social Media = TV

Social media (unlike search) is similar to TV.

People do not know exactly what they are looking for yet and thus they want to discover it.

They need some suggestions.

Yet they also want to know upfront what type of content to expect.

Like on TV they only choose specific channels:

• CNN for news
• Discovery Channel for science
• Disney for kids

Thus social media algorithms often work like a TV set.

They offer you a select few topics you chose to engage with in the past.

When you serve marketing topics on the discovery channel or at CNN people ignore you.

When you say “marketing” in general you will get significantly less traffic per se.

Most people do not like marketing and are not interested in it. They may mistake it for ads altogether.

Thus you may want to stay low key and not appear to be marketing at all.

Especially users of sites like Reddit do not appreciate being marketed to.

Also for business users marketing is already a way too broad category.

You want to decide upfront which specific marketing category you are talking about.

Do not treat social media like TV in the sense of broadcasting though. This is common mistake!

Real life examples

OK, what does this mean in practice?

Let’s provide some real time examples.

When the post is covering strictly SEO decide whether you write for the micro-niche of SEO experts right from the start:

SEO Techniques for Rocking the Holidays

Remember that your audience is comprised of SEO people then.

Why? You start with the SEO acronym only a few people get.

There are a bunch of SEO communities on Reddit for example where I’d share your question or insights.

I prefer the likes of

• r/bigseo
• r/TechSEO
• r/seogrowth
• r/seogaps
• r/SEO_for_AI (where I help out as a mod)

Are you after a larger audience, think marketers in general, small business owners or online shoppers?

Label and create content accordingly. Share it at the right places!

A post like “Why X/Twitter is Still Important for Small Business” could fit in “small business” category.

Yet you may want try to write for an even wider audience.

It still ha snot the biggest traffic potential though as X/Twitter is not everybody’s cup of tea.

How to Improve Your Writing Without Additional Tools

This is a general interest type of post. It’s helpful advice for all kinds of creative people.

You can reach a more general audience of writers and bloggers.

Remember though, also people interested in writing books read it. Writing advice is not just about blogging then.

You get a larger audience potentially but make sure to deliver.

Private Search: How Can You Protect Yourself Online from Unwanted Looks?

You can describe “how to search” when you write about search engine optimization for an audience of end users.

Then you are not just attempting to reach website owners or optimizers.

Here the audience is a little smaller than in “writing” and “marketing”.

Yet there are more people interested in search than blogging e.g.

A post about ten ways to tweak your website to make it more suitable for search engine spiders fits in “Web development”.

You can get quite a big audience here that is not only comprised of people who already work in search.

My most popular posts on seo2.blog are dealing with basic tools everybody uses.

The use cases are very common! I cover

• search
• writing
• reading

Beware of the wrong topics in the wrong places!

Now beware though! People will hate you for wasting their time once you get too popular.

You may get thousands of visitors yet also get ignored and worse lots of negative feedback when you lure general audiences.

People who are not interested in a very specific topic to not appreciate being force fed your irrelevant content.

I see posts getting removed every single day on specific Reddit subs like r/blogging or r/TechSEO.

Be both as specific as needed and as general as possible.

Ask yourself before writing ideally or at least before posting and sharing on social media:

• Is my post topic really relevant for the Internet as a whole?
• Does it matter to all business people or even small business owners?
• Is it just written for a small expert audience like online marketers?

The first choice would be an article about internet technology.

The second option is about small business and the third deals with online marketing.

Thus you have a mainstream audience, a niche audience and a micro-niche audience you address respectively.

You can’t always make all of the above audiences happy and trying would dilute the message. Make sure to choose upfront!

* Creative Commons image by Maersk Line