How to Understand your Social Media Audience

Companies are constantly striving to get the most out of their social media presence and that means understanding your audience and figuring out how to win them over.

Oftentimes, the marketer creates a campaign with not really identifying who their target market is. By missing this step, your social media campaign is headed down the path to failure before it even starts. Instead, you should build learn about your social media audiences and what will truly make an impact on them so they engage with your posts.

First Step to Knowing Your Social Media Audience

Identify your social media demographic. Things to consider are age, gender, and geographic location of your potential audience.

Facebook and Twitter are known to appeal to those who are 30 or older while Instagram draws a much younger crowd. Pinterest reaches far more females than males.

You’ll also want to discover what devices they use to utilize each platform with content that can be viewed nicely on a desktop or on the run.

It’s All About the Content

Content published on social media tells a story that needs to connect with the audience.

It’s a window into your viewpoints, opinions, and even emotions that give the employer, brand, or business a personality that connects with the viewer. Such character enlightenments are what draw a large following on social media and become an indispensable tool that allows you to reach people in a very pronounced way.

Create a content marketing plan that becomes a strong outline for the content that you will consistently post on your channels to harness the specific personality types that you are seeking. 

You will also need to post consistently. Ideally, you will need to do at least once a day, if not more. In order to maintain your posting cadence, a tool like the one offered by Crosscap can help. These marketing software tools are useful for anyone seeking to.

Encourage Sharing on Social Media

If you have a small audience, then you are going to want to encourage sharing. You want people to repost your stuff so their friends, family, and co-workers will see it. Sharing is how you grow your audience, so you need to post things that people want to share.

Here are a few tips that will help you appeal to your audiences’ personality interests: 

• Use hashtags that are relevant to whatever you are posting so new people can find you. This is especially true for Instagram but also works well on Twitter.
• Tag other companies (and people if you can) in your Facebook posts to increase the chance of being seen by a new audience.
• Use trending topics to your advantage by sharing them or creating posts around the subjects.
• Create balance by avoiding excessive promotion. Create a calendar where you are promoting your company in 33% to 50% of your posts only.
• Think of social media as a stage to provide your audience with entertainment and valuable posts.
• People on social media have an eight-second attention span so learn to be quick and interesting. Try to create posts that have under 50 characters.
• Don’t be afraid to use links if you have more to say in your social media post.
• Do not hesitate to tell your viewers to share your post because they respond better to a strong call to action than a soft approach.
• Use only original photos to develop a feeling of intimacy and closeness with your audience.

Using Social Media Tools

Consider investing in an effective data analysis tool that helps you better adapt to your social media audience.

Using these tools can help you measure, track and monitor things with ease. The data you gather will help you better visualize your stats so you can clearly see content behavior, impressions of your audience, and fan growth.

Once you have an idea of such stats, you can better draft your future posts to be even more effective and compelling to the audience that you have.

Picking the Right Times

You should know when your audience is the most active on social media. Time is especially true if you are trying to target a specific geographic area.

At the start, you should try posting at various times throughout the week. If people engage more with the Monday morning post then they do with the Tuesday afternoon post, then you should try to post at that time more.

Keep track of everything and figure out what time is best. A social media tool can help you keep track of activity on each post.

Have Some Fun With Your Social Media Posts

Your audience often turns to social media as an escape from their real-life stress, so you should provide them with something to smile about.

You’ll be amazed at how a joke will live on in a person’s thoughts throughout the day, so don’t be afraid to work some humor into your social media posts, even if they don’t relate to your business. Be funny and unique so people can have some fun with your social media posts.

Once you have the tools ready to go and you’re ready to have some fun, start posting. Start taking note of who likes, comments, and shares your social media posts so you have a better idea of who your ideal audience is.

You’ll be surprised how much you can learn about your audience by just taking notes and paying attention.