How to Find Your Target Audience on Social Media

Are you struggling to connect with your target audience on social media? Looking for ways to be more effective on social media? Are you getting lots of followers and fans who are not really interested in the products or services your company offers? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then the 4 steps below on how to find your target audience on social media will help you tremendously.

When most business owner jump into the world of social media, they usually begin by setting up profiles and posting status updates whenever they have time to do so. After a couple of weeks, they begin to start asking themselves questions in their head because they are not seeing the results they anticipated from social media. As with everything else in business, having a plan of action is your best asset and this hold true for social media marketing for your business. It’s important that you know who your target audience, but it’s critical that you know how to find and locate your target audience on social media platforms in order to achieve success with your social media marketing campaigns.

4 Steps To Find Your Target Audience on Social Media

1. Establish Your Social Media Goals: Assemble your team (even if you are a team of one) and ask yourself the question: What are you trying to accomplish for your company by being on social media? Maybe your goal is to drive more traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, improve your corporate image, deliver better customer service, or increase sales. Your social media goals should be crystal clear and should also seamlessly connect to a main business goal that you’ve set for your company for the year.

1. Identify Your Target Market: Many businesses, start-ups and even more established companies, think that they know who their target market is but most really don’t. Have you invested the time and effort into identifying a clear and deeper understanding of who makes up your target audience? Take the the time to answer these questions below as you map out your target market.There can be a multitude of elements that make up a buyer persona profile; however, we recommend that you start out identifying 6 – 8 elements for each buyer persona profile of your target market.

   • What is profile of your ideal customer?
   • What is the demographic profile of your target market (male, female, age, where do they live, etc.).
   • Next, go one step further and develop buyer personas which goes beyond demographics.
   • What type of job does your ideal customer have?
   • What are the things that motivate people to make purchases of the type of products or services your company offers?
   • What is their behavior process for making decisions? Do they search online first, look for recommendations from friends, look for sales vs. paying full price, are they more concerned with value versus price, etc.?

1. Do Your Research Knowing how your existing and potential customers use social media is an important part of developing an effective social media strategy. In the past, companies relied on market research to decide what outbound marketing channel (radio, print and television advertising) would be most effective to reach their marketing campaign goals. Today, big and small businesses can leverage data compiled by research organizations to gather information on how consumers use social media. The most important consideration when planning a social media strategy is to know your audience. For your business to achieve your social media goals, you must must have a clear understanding of who you are targeting, which social media platforms your target audience prefers, and on what types of content they consume, share, and post.

   You ultimately want to determine what social media sites your existing and prospective customers are using, because you want to be where they are conversating online. The Pew Research Center is a great resource for data and here is a link to their Social Media Update 2013 report (released Dec. 30, 2013) to get you started.

   You can also perform your own research to find out if your target market is active on a particular social media platform. Here are 2 strategies you can do immediately:

   • Check out the activity on your competitor’s social media profile pages. If you notice that people are commenting, sharing, and engaging with content on a particular social media platform that your competitor is using, then that would be a good indicator that your target audience is on that same platform.
   • Do a keyword search on each of the social media platforms. Search for the top keywords related to your business and the keywords that your target audience would most likely us to find the products or services you offer.

1. Listen & Engage: Social media is a two-way street and timing is very important. Therefore, a successful social media strategy is more about listening than talking. Listening is not only a great communication skill for in-person conversations — it’s a golden skill in the social media sphere that you need to take time to do. When you effectively “listen” to conversations that happen online and interject at the right time to the right person with the right type of message, the end result could be one of your postings going viral, your biggest day of online sales of a product, an influx of leads who have downloaded your ebook, etc.

   Listening and engaging with your target audience and targeted influencers online who talk or blog about your company’s types of products or services can produce big return-on-investment (ROI). Be sure to remember that when you are jumping into a conversation, you’ll want to add value to the conversation by offering advice, a resource, or providing a solution to a pain point that your target audience may be experiencing.

When you follow the steps above, you’ll have great success in finding your target audience on social media. Do you have a tip that has worked for you to find your target audience? If so, please share your feedback in the comments. We value your feedback. – Thank you in advance.

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