Among online marketing channels, social media proves to be the most powerful in bringing brands and their target users together. It’s no secret that major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube make this happen through precise social media targeting features.
But there’s a catch. With 3.78 billion social media users to date, it’s not enough to build a social profile and wait for people — random people — to notice you and your offering. To fully leverage social platforms you need to make use of the available targeting features, you need to find your audience and target them on their preferred platform. Defining your target audience is an essential step in an effective social media strategy.
So, what is a target audience? It is a group of people most likely to take an interest in your product or service. Your social media target audience shares common traits, such as demographics, behavior and location. With this information, you can deliver organic and paid content that provides value to them, meets their needs and builds trust with your brand. And you can align your outreach activities with each platform they hang out on.
If you’re ready to reach out to the right people and achieve results, let this blog walk you through the process of identifying your social media audience. You will learn:
• How to find your target audience on social media
• How to align with the best social media for business success
• Why you should work with social media marketing experts
• How to align your marketing persona with real-life customers with the help of a social media marketing agency
How to Find Your Target Audience on Social Media
While you can sell to anyone on social media, it is much more efficient and affordable to focus your efforts on a specific market — that is, to practice social media targeting. This section is all about helping you discover and implement the steps to identify your target market.
1. Leverage Marketing Personas
The key to kickstarting your targeting game plan is to perform social media audience analysis. You can divide this activity into two parts: the first one is about creating a social media persona based on an existing buyer persona.
You can use current data from your marketing, sales and support teams to update your social media target market persona. Look into demographic details like age, gender, education and income. Include their pain points and priorities. If you have access to your customer list, make sure to analyze that too. It would be productive to include details like spending power.
Incorporate what you glean from persona marketing, but don’t decide if it’s a Facebook persona, a Twitter persona or the like, yet.
2. Tap Into Social Media Audience Tools
The second part of your social media analysis involves insight-gathering tools like Google Analytics and native services such as the Facebook or Instagram target audience insights tool.
Through Google Analytics, you can explore the preferred social platforms of existing customers and the kind of information they look for in those, e.g., product demo or benefits.
As for native platform tools, you can plug the data from the first step and create lookalike audiences. This tactic is handy in defining, say, your Facebook ads target audience.
3. Conduct Polls to Complement Persona Marketing Data
By now, you probably have built a picture in your head of what your social media target audience looks like. But wait, conducting social media audience analysis doesn’t end with big data. You can also directly ask current customers about their thoughts and sentiments through surveys and polls.
One effective tactic would be embedding the survey in an email marketing campaign. In sending your email, aim to collect information about what type of content they seek on social media and which platforms they frequently use for this purpose.
One the results are in, they should help you determine actual needs, gaps and the best social media platforms for business growth.
4. Employ Social Listening
Now, it’s time to further your transition from theoretical to practical by spending time on social media. Here, you can be specific (how to find your target audience on Facebook) vs general (how to find your target audience on social media). To have a richer target social media persona, listen to what your type of audience is talking about.
Additionally, make sure to understand the nuances of each social network. For instance, social listening focused on a Twitter target audience involves brand conversations around hashtags and trending topics. On the other hand, insights into a YouTube target audience can be gleaned from comments, likes and subscriptions. If you’re open to partnering with a social media marketing company, find one that can help you navigate through the nuances of your target platforms.
5. Research the Competition
Check out what your competitors are doing across social platforms. Can you identify their buyer persona or social media target audience? What content types are they using, and what is working for them?
This method is called competitor research, and it lets you perform a social media comparison and is designed to provide you with insight or inspiration. It gives you time and space to learn when and why your rivals are doing well in engaging with their social media target market. And it essentially allows you to find additional ideas for your strategy.
The steps to identify your target market are dynamic, so you can do most of the tactics for social media audience analysis in order or according to need. But a social media marketing expert would tell you the process never peaks. You have to go back to the steps a few times throughout the year to keep your marketing personas, as well as strategy, up-to-date.
Such an approach leads to sustainability and longevity, which is great to apply by yourself if you have adequate resources. Otherwise, it’s better to take steps to identify your target market with a social media marketing company.
The Four Best Social Media Platforms for Business Alignment
Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have established user bases, making them ideal for certain industries but not others. To achieve success, ensure you nail the alignment between the social network and target market persona.
In this section, you can assess each one quickly to determine the best social media for business niches and industries.
Stop feeling clueless about how to target the right audience on Facebook. With the right tools, trends, information and even social media agency, you can tap into the platform’s broad and diverse reach and build your ideal Facebook persona.
Here are some Facebook target audience statistics and details to guide you:
• According to We Are Social, more than half of its users are aged 25 to 34 (31.6 percent) and 18 to 24 (23.8 percent).
• The majority of your Facebook target audience uses mobile to access the platform.
• Viewing photos and sharing content are the leading activities of Facebook users.
• Business-to-consumers (B2C) brands stand to benefit a lot from its targeting features, which help raise brand awareness and drive revenue to your site. This does not mean you should not establish your presence and learn how to find your target audience on Facebook if you are a business-to-business (B2B) company.
The earlier section has taught you how to target audience on Instagram. But why use this platform to promote your brand, products or services?
Aside from its over 1 billion monthly active users, here are some facts about the visual branding app:
If there’s a marketing persona that suits most of your Instagram target audience, that would be “brand ambassadors.” The platform comprises influencers and followers, but 90 percent of all users follow at least one business account. So your social media target market is predisposed to engage with brands on the platform right from the start.
• Adults in the United States aged 18 to 29 make up 71 percent of its users. That said, here’s how to attract your target audience on Instagram: tailor your persona marketing to the needs of this demographic.
• Your Instagram target audience may give branded posts a lot of love. In fact, they’re 10 times more likely to engage with advertising content than members of your Facebook ads target audience are.
• If you’re in the fashion, beauty, skincare or retail industry, you may find your audience easily on this platform.
• On the other hand, social media marketing expert strategists encourage those in real estate, education and food service to learn how to target audience on Instagram more effectively.
You and your Twitter target audience can engage as equals on the platform. This makes Twitter ideal for brand management and customer support.
Twitter also has the ability to attract a unique social media persona. On top of that, the platform stands out because of the following reasons:
• About 21 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, making it the 6th most popular platform.
• People are more familiar with Twitter than Instagram (92 vs 91 percent). Meanwhile, Facebook target audience (95 percent) leads in this regard.
• Eighty-two percent of B2B marketers have used content marketing in the last 12 months to connect to their Twitter target audience.
• Some people who are on Twitter also have a Facebook account. That said, you can create a multi-platform strategy that factors in the overlap between your customers’ Twitter buyer persona and Facebook persona.
• You can then leverage Twitter’s high digital trust ranking to convert your overlapped Facebook ads target audience. Also, consider how a social media marketing agency can help you turn profits using this promising advertising tactic.
YouTube
If you know how to target the right audience on Facebook, you should know that social media targeting on YouTube requires a bit more expertise. Social media marketing experts attribute the rise of this criterion to the platform’s significant growth even during troubled times.
Indeed, YouTube has created and delivered more value since its inception. So, when is YouTube the best social media for business and customer relationships?
• Among the top social media companies, YouTube is the one owned by online technology powerhouse Google. Meaning, it relies on sophisticated methods to compel users to stay on the platform.
• You have a higher chance of reaching Generation Z’s older members and millennials on YouTube than in a TV commercial.
• Overall, 62 percent of the YouTube target audience access the platform daily, rising to 92 percent weekly.
• What is a target audience worth? YouTube users are known to spend money on in-app purchases, e.g., YouTube Premium and Channel Membership.
• Your YouTube target audience will likely give an ad a chance before skipping it: say, 5.5 seconds of a 15-second ad and 7.4 seconds of a 30-second ad. Despite the barrier it creates for brands and advertisers, this habit is already shown to boost brand recall.
Other platforms that let you find your audience and create a marketing persona to maximize targeting features:
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• TikTok
Note that the best social media platforms for business and brands’ marketing efforts do not exist in a vacuum. With target market persona overlaps and differences, it’s up to you to make a social media comparison and choose the most appropriate for your current needs. But if your resources allow it, a credible social media agency would recommend an integrated social media marketing approach.
Why Work With Social Media Marketing Experts
The steps to find your target audience on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. are only one part of social media marketing. Meanwhile, social media marketing is only one of several digital marketing channels you can deploy. And so, we are not exaggerating when we say social media comparison and analysis will already take up much of your time.
One practical step to take from here is to enlist the help of a social media marketing agency. This isn’t merely outsourcing something that you need right now but has no bandwidth to do. This is about finding the right social media marketing company to launch your short-term or long-term social media marketing efforts.
Thus, you should look for a social media agency that:
• Understands your urgent needs
• Devises a strategy based on your objectives and data
• Fills information gaps with thorough research
• Manages your budget and time creatively and effectively
From Marketing Personas to Loyal Customers
Again, what is a target audience worth?
This blog has shown you that it’s worth learning how to target the right audience on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other social media companies or platforms. This fundamental task is necessary to kick off a sustainable and successful social media marketing campaign.
However, knowing what you know now, you may also think of the task as daunting — especially if you’ve never done it before. This is where you can choose to work with a social media marketing expert. To deliver your desired results, a team of strategists and specialists can design a strategy, make decisions and manage your social media accounts.
But can you afford it? If you go with Thrive, then absolutely yes! We are a social media marketing company that carries out deliverables until we hit your goals and milestones. To ensure you maximize your return on investment (ROI), we also appropriate your budget while streamlining our social media marketing and management services.
All of these start with comprehensive audience research. Leverage our decades-long experience in social media targeting and call our consultants at 866-908-4748 to learn more about the perks.
