Define Your Target Audience

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By now you should already have researched your target (and actual) audience for your overall business. If not, here’s some tips on defining your audience. While your social media followers will factor into your larger audience, you should not assume they are the same (or even the same for every social platform). They may represent a cross-section, a more niche selection, or even an unexpectedly different audience altogether. In order to create the kind of content that will meet your goals, you’ll need to research who exactly this content is for. Flat design illustration of multiple business characters By Bonographic Each social media platform has its own user-base and trends, and most of these have been heavily documented over the years. For example, sites like Statista provide comprehensive, up-to-date statistics on topics like social media marketing. Though not as thorough, industry content providers like Hubspot, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social also round up demographic statistics for free.

If you already have social media accounts you should also research who is currently following you. Each platform will have its own analytics tools that can pull information about your followers from their profile data (google the platform with the term “for business”). Otherwise, tools like Hootsuite can cross-reference follower data from all of your linked social accounts. Infographic design showing age demographic statistics for social media use By maleskuliah As with any social scenario, there can be a background remove service lot of stereotypes about the types of people who participate on certain platforms (one of the most common: that newer apps are automatically only for tweens). As a business, it is your responsibility to base your strategy on real data. Once you have collected all of your findings on your audience (both current and potential) into one document, you can make decisions about what portion of them you want to target based on what will help you achieve your goals.



Some questions to ask are: What common demographic information do we know about our customers? What platforms do they commonly use and how? What are they looking for on social media that we can deliver to them? As your final step, it is important to create personas that represent different sections of your target audience. Demographic information can help you to understand your audience’s income, location, habits and values, but it tends to be a cold and clinical way of thinking about people. Social media is about creating conversations, and it can be hard to do so with statistical data. Personas help you to visualize the actual people you are looking to connect with, and to brainstorm how your content will meet them along their buyer’s journey. 4. Choose the best social media platforms for your brand There are dozens of popular social media apps that your brand could take advantage of. Because it can take a lot of time and money to get the most out of any platform, you need to dedicate your business resources to the platforms that will give you the most return on investment, or ROI.