Zooming in on Target Audience
Identifying your potential customer is a filter before you can seek out your audience. Starting with the simple distinctions as of whether your typical customers are male or female? Young or old? Their occupations and how much money do they make? What are the likes and dislikes of them? Whether your customers are local or do they live all over the world? Whether they belong to a specific ethnicity or do they come from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds? Then based upon these questions, analyzing the profiles to find more like their likes and dislikes.
Take care of facts such as age. A younger audience of 18-34-year-old dominated Instagram users in June 2018. Young people tend to congregate on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, while professionals beyond 35 make up the majority of LinkedIn users.
Example, If you’re targeting middle-aged suburban men, it doesn’t make sense investing all your energy on Instagram —studies show that the majority of Instagram users in that age group are women from urban areas. To figure where your particular target demographic resides online, investigating into countless studies and articles published on the demographics of social media users is useful, and most are easily unearthed through a quick Google search.
There are some creative people like John Lee Dumas. He talks about creating a business avatar-creating a fictional character of your ideal customer to the point of naming it, knowing how many kids it has or what it does on the weekends. Adding as many attributes to your avatar can help you identify your ideal customer online.
Some tips can help you pinpoint your target audience, along with some demographic information for the top social media platforms which are represented below. Mastering the tools to find your target audience in social media can be a powerful tool in leading customers to your site and eventually converting them into buyers.
#1 Platform Advertising Options
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn all have their advertising options. When you create and target your ad, each offers specific drill-down options to help you focus only on your intended audience.
Facebook Ads Manager
Walking your way to potential customers on Facebook is relatively easy. Suppose you own a scrapbook shop somewhere. When you type the phrase “people who like scrapbooking in Massachusetts” into Facebooks graph search, you will receive a list of more than 1,000 Facebook users in that area interested in scrapbooking. Or if your product is related to nutrition and you want to reach women in a particular town who are interested in nutrition, you can find out that X number of people on Facebook match that audience.
ads.twitter.com
Twitter provides users with a similar search tool like Facebook. Its advanced search function allows classifying users based on what they are tweeting as well as the time and location. A variety of external tools are available on twitter which enables you to search for keywords found in Twitter user bios like FollowerWonk or Twiangulate which uncovers matches in both bios and usernames.
Followerwonk is a third-party Twitter tool providing searches for common words and themes in bios. It gives a bit more information than Twitter analytics free for analysis of accounts with up to 25,000 followers.
A Twitter list called Favorite Local Comic Geeks
You can create a list which Twitter notifies the users have been added to your list which increases your visibility to them.
# 2 Social media analysis tools
Organizations now do not have to wait for the results of market surveys to know the market trends or understand their competitors instead there are many social media analysis tools available. Here we are showcasing one software tool, Buffer among many to understand the filters and parameters available for studying the target audience which remains more or less same for similar tools.
Buffer offers the following categories as a filter for various social sites.
Facebook: Audience Insights, Page Insights, and graph search
Instagram: Instagram Insights and SocialRank
Twitter: Twitter analytics, Followerwonk, and SocialRank
LinkedIn: Linkedin analytics
Pinterest: Pinterest analytics
Facebook Ads Manager for Facebook
Includes “Demographics” tab- Age and gender, Lifestyle, Relationship status, Education level, Job title; “Page Likes” tab- Top categories that your fans like, Pages that your fans like and “Locations” tab- Top cities, Top countries, Top languages
Besides, there is other information you can look for if that is a factor in your audience search: such as Activity – as in user’s Facebook activities, Household – as in household size, income, etc. and Purchase – as in purchase behavior.
Instagram Insights for Instagram
Instagram Insights is for the business profile on Instagram. The best way to learn about your potential followers is through Instagram Insights.
The Buffer provides the following information about your Instagram followers from your Instagram Insights:
- Gender distribution
- Age range distribution (men and women)
- Top locations (cities and countries)
- your followers’ most active day and time
Social Rank
On connecting your Instagram account to Social Rank at Buffer, it will show you the many different
information about your followers such as the following:
- Gender distribution
- Top followers locations
- Popular bio words
- Popular hashtags
- The popular time to post
- Followers distribution (no of followers your audience has)
LinkedIn Analytics
Buffer’s LinkedIn analytics offers seven types of demographic data about your followers:
- Country
- Region
- Job function
- Seniority
- Industry
- Company size
- Employment status
You can find it helpful to look at the job function and industry data to get a sense of who our followers are. These insights give you directions whom you want to connect with, and which people you might want to send an InMail.
#3: Surveys and research publications
Outside of Social Media
Maybe your audience doesn’t reside exclusively within the realms of social media applications like Facebook and Twitter. A web search can show up countless independent online communities based on industry and a product like antique fanatics in Michigan to Ethiopian food buffs in the San Francisco Bay area. People are chit-chatting away in specialty chat rooms, posting on local blogs, and posing questions to individual interest forums. The publications of PewResearch and Business Insider are right places to search for your target audience.
Another place where you might take is to look to your direct competitors—which social media platforms they are using the most and study the profiles of followers on their pages.
The survey questions can be about the social media sites regularly used? , Websites you visit for information on _______ (for example, remodeling ideas, pricing strategies or whatever is appropriate for your business)?, Choice for podcasts? If so, which ones? , Visited blogs? If so, which ones?
There are many free tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to collect your answers.
Summing Up
For a successful audience search, start by identifying your ideal customer through surveys and research with guest blogging opportunities, targeted ads on social platforms and engagement with powerful search tools on Social networking sites. Once through with these screening process, incentivize them to visit your website and get to know you and your business better.
