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Digital Marketing

Social Media

Building Target Audiences for Social Media

Identifying your target audience is often a complex task in social media. However, once you gain a clear understanding of who your audience is, you'll be able to create social media content that is more relevant and impactful.

min read

Dec 28, 2023

Social Media

Audience

Why Audience is Important

Social media platforms have become the quintessential spaces for interaction, information sharing, and entertainment, hosting diverse and dynamic audiences. With billions of users across various platforms, social media presents an unparalleled opportunity for businesses to expand their reach, but reaching the right person takes research and analysis. Understanding the individual audiences across social media platforms is crucial to developing an effective social media strategy.

Current Audience Data

Understanding who your current audience is on social media forms the backbone of an effective digital marketing strategy. The audience that currently interacts with your brand online can offer valuable insights into who is attracted to your content and why. Start by observing who follows you on social media platforms. Pay close attention to who interacts with your posts. By actively monitoring and analyzing conversations across your handles, you can also gain invaluable insights into consumer perceptions and the overall sentiment for your content. It's not just about gathering data on what content your followers are willing to engage with; it's about understanding the context and sentiments behind the engagement.

Interactions: Individual "likes" are the most basic form of engagement. You should track the quantity but also the profiles of users who frequently like your posts. What gets the most interaction and from who?

Shares: Shares and retweets indicate a higher level of engagement, as users are willing to associate your content with their personal profiles. What content gets the most shares? What types of users are sharing this content?

Comments: Comments are a goldmine for insights. Using the individual user data that is accessible from your brand profile can provide individual clues and help you build insights on audience preferences and behaviors.

Behavioral Insights

When considering your social media strategy, it's important to understand the audience's perception of your brand or products. Are they giving positive feedback or raising concerns? Engaging in social listening tools and monitoring online discussions the primary way to fully understand how consumers view your brand. Collecting information from your customers, social followers, and trackable discussions will give you a comprehensive understanding of your current audience and their behavior. What are they seeking when they follow your brand? This insight is important to decipher so that you can adjust your social media strategy and content to meet your audience's expectations and needs. There are four primary reasons consumers follow brands on social media.

To discover new products or services (57%).
To stay informed about company updates and news (47%).
To learn about promotions or discounts (40%).
For entertainment (40%).

Social Listening

Social media listening tools allow you to monitor and analyze conversations across various platforms, giving you a comprehensive view of a given audience segment's opinions and behaviors. Understanding the topics of conversation among your target audience is critical for building insights into their preferences and needs. Social listening tools also help improve speculative audience insights with concrete information about what exactly captures the interest of your audience. What themes, products, or services do they express positive sentiment for? Conversely, what are they critical of? Another key aspect is understanding the challenges your audience faces. What problems are they vocal about on social media? Are they seeking advice or solutions in particular areas? Each insights you can gather from your audience data will be helpful for you in shaping your decisions for content and choices you make in your social media strategy.

Generational Preferences

Understanding the demographics of your audience is a critical step in building a successful social media strategy. Each age group or generation comes with its own set of preferences and behaviors on social media. Recognizing generational differences helps in selecting the right content and platforms – while Gen Z might be more engaged with short-form videos on TikTok, older generations might prefer detailed articles or Facebook posts.

Gen Z (Born 1997-2012): This group is tech-savvy, values authenticity, and tends to gravitate towards platforms like TikTok and Instagram. They are more likely to engage with interactive and visually appealing content.

Millennials (Born 1981-1996): Millennials are known for valuing experiences. They are active on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and respond well to user-generated content and social causes.

Gen X (Born 1965-1980): This demographic is often looking for informative content. They are more likely to use Facebook and value straightforward, detailed, and reliable information.

Baby Boomers (Born 1946-1964): They prefer Facebook and value content that is easy to consume, such as videos or articles that are informative and not overly technical.

Millennials (Born 1981-1996): Millennials are known for valuing experiences. They are active on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and respond well to user-generated content and social causes.

Gen X (Born 1965-1980): This demographic is often looking for informative content. They are more likely to use Facebook and value straightforward, detailed, and reliable information.

Baby Boomers (Born 1946-1964): They prefer Facebook and value content that is easy to consume, such as videos or articles that are informative and not overly technical.

Behavioral Demographics

Zip codes and locations can tell you more about a person than you may think. This form of analysis goes beyond location targeting and uses the collective data of a geographic area to understand lifestyle preferences, cultural nuances, and other shared attributes for various audiences. By examining the demographic and psychographic data associated with specific zip codes, marketers can gain insights into the spending habits, interests, and even typical behaviors of the people living there. This level of detail allows for more tailored content strategy specific audience, leading to more effective and impactful choices in social media content.

For example, ESRI Tapestry Segmentation is a geographic information system (GIS) tool that classifies US residential neighborhoods into distinct segments based on their socioeconomic and demographic composition. This system uses data from various sources, including census data, consumer spending data, and other statistics, to create a detailed portrait of neighborhood demographics. By exporting geographic data from your social media handles, you can use ESRI Tapestry data to find detailed profiles of your various audience segments, with new details like income and family structure, along with new insights into the lifestyle and consumer behavior of each segment, such as preferences in entertainment, shopping, and digital activities that are not logged as part of the data collected within a given social media platform.

Competitive Analysis

Analyzing your competitors is a valuable tool for a brand or business to define their target audience effectively. While your social handles and campaigns may have much more easily accessible consumer data, your competitors also have a degree of public data that can be acquired through qualitative analysis or marketing tools with competitor tracking features. The same content analysis that allows you to understand performance and engagement relative to different content attributes can also be used across content from competing brands. Which content is performing the best across your competition? How does engagement and sentiment compare to your own? What differences, similarities, and new insights can you extra from audience data? Equipping yourself with insights from your competitors will help you create a better audience profile and ultimately help you build a more effective social media strategy for your brand.