How To Find Your Target Audience for Social Media
Reading Time: ~4 Mins | Written By: Anabel Blesch
Identifying, and understanding your target audience is a key part of all digital marketing departments, including your social media strategy! Your target audience is who exactly you want to reach, which is one of the most foundational pieces of marketing. If you don’t know who they are or can’t find the ways to reach them, you aren’t likely to produce the results you’re hoping for.
When approaching target audience research and reporting through social media specifically, there are some key advantages, tools and tactics that you can implement based on the nature of the platforms. We provided 5 key ways you can find your target audience for your social media strategy below!
1. Start with the audience you do have
Whether you have pre-existing social media channels in use or are able to gather website analytics, you should research and document key factors about your current audience. Factors like age, location, timezone, preferred device, and interests will help you get a better understanding of how to best reach them via your social media channels. This step will also inform which social media platforms to invest time in and determine if they align with your target audience.
Most social media channels provide audience insights within the platform itself, making it easy to begin the reporting process. For example, you can click directly on the ‘insights icon’ in the top right corner of your Instagram page. From there you can refine what analytics you’re looking for such as reach, impressions, post saves and more. For other platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn, you can view insights from visiting profile settings or visiting the given platform’s designated ‘business suite’.
Keep a detailed report in Google Sheets or Excel on defining features of your existing audience. You can always refer back to this data to continue informing your strategy as you carry on with your target audience research.
2. Research your competitors
Like most marketing techniques, analyzing competitor approaches can provide really valuable insight on how to best reach your target audience. Research their channels to get an idea of who they’re reaching and if they’re doing it well. Are they reaching your specific audience and implementing content ideas you hadn’t thought of? Maybe there’s a way you can find similar content approaches within your own strategy. Not only that, it can also help you determine what strategies not to implement in order to remain unique. Be sure to take note of your competitors without replicating their content, as this becomes very obvious no matter who your audience is.
To do some in depth research on your competitors, platforms such as SEMRush and SparkToro can provide you with easy to use, and valuable information. You can use these platforms to find ranking reports on keywords as well as competitor websites.
3. Create ideal personas within your strategy
You may already know the term “customer persona”, which means a persona that builds out particular attributes of your ideal customer. Things like their interests and behaviors, as well as demographics and location will be key to identify and understand in order to reach them.
When you combine this practice with your research on existing customers, it will help fine tune more tactics to appropriately reach and affect your audience.
4. Identify the channels and content these personas are most active with
Every social media channel is different, and you don’t need to use every one under the sun in order to have an effective social media strategy. You should identify the type of content that your customer personas interact with, as well as identify the channels. If your target audience is primarily high school students, you likely won’t reach them via LinkedIn, or if you’re looking to target retired professionals, you’ll be less likely to find them on TikTok. Finding out the differences between social media platforms will give you a better understanding of where you should focus your efforts.
5. Connect with your existing audience
A way in which target audience research differs greatly when using social media, is that it is a tool that allows you to speak directly to your audience in a way that most research doesn’t allow for. Many social media channels now offer polls, or questionnaires where you can learn more about what your audience is responding well to and what they’d love to see from you. Comment sections and direct messages can be home to so much audience knowledge that your team can sift through to best determine your social media strategy. Never underestimate the power of communication and engagement when identifying your target audience!
