How to your Target Audience on Social Media

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Target Audience

Most people on social media believe that just putting content up and throwing in a few hashtags will bring in a large audience. However, marketers know that it is more than just content and hashtags. There should be a strategy in place to attract a good audience. As a business, you need a specific audience: one must be interested in buying your products. Any publicity can be good publicity, but in the long run, you must be able to reach out to the target audience for your product. There are many small businesses that have managed to amass quite a large audience on various social media platforms. You cannot monetise it, eg, you sell children's toys, however, you've managed to attract a largely middle-aged male audience by creating biker related content. 

Identifying your target audience:

Before creating a social media targeting strategy for your social media platform, it is important to have a clear picture your buyer persona. This will be the guideline for your strategy and will help you understand your audience's preferences. (Read this article for a more detailed guide for identifying your target audience)

Once you have a good understanding of your target audience. Next is analysing your current social media platforms and creating a base understanding of your current audience. This can be done by a variety of listening tools or using the built in social media analytics on each platform.

Here are a list of social media listening tools.

1. HubSpot Social Media Management Software
2. Sprout Social
3. Falcon.io
4. Hootsuite
5. Buffer
6. TweetReach

Key take away information from these listening tools. Analytics is gathering insights on how your audience interacts with your current social media platform. Identifying which content gathers the most engagement (likes, shares, comments etc) are key indicators of which content works and what doesn't with your audience.

After identifying what your audience likes and dislikes. It is important to replicate or enhance future content based on your current findings.

We have listed out other ideas how to attract your target audience:

• Use the hashtags on Instagram, and Twitter. 

Search out and identify the hashtags that apply to you and that your audience use. 

Observe the type of content that appears on them. 

Make note of the people who pop up often on the popular page 

This information will allow you to narrow down the type of content that you must create to be popular with your intended audience. It also will allow you to identify the popular people in your niche with which you could collaborate. It also will allow you to see what your competitors are doing and how you can differentiate yourself. 

•  Use Facebook groups 

Facebook groups are where the most active enthusiasts of your niche will congregate. Join the groups and interact with them. IN A NON SALES WAY, most groups will kick you if you enter them and start spam selling. Again like the Instagram hashtags. It will get to see what people In your niche want and do. Because Facebook does not have a hashtag search feature as such,  Facebook groups are invaluable, as they are the only place where you will get to see a large amount of user-generated content.

You can also set up your own Facebook group if you already have a moderate audience. Encourage past users and anyone who interacts with you to join, this will allow you to directly communicate with them and get direct feedback. 

• Facebook/ Instagram adverts: these are a good way to try targeting different narrow niches. 

You can spend a small amount of money and test out different niches. The adverts allow you to choose very narrow demographics of age, location, and interests. You can put out different adverts and draw your conclusions from the results. There are certain suits on Facebook that allow you to create different variations of your content and upload them to see which is the most popular. 

• Connect your email database to Facebook ads manager.

This will also help with finding customers who have expressed interest in you on your newsletter but not your socials. You can use this to encourage them to join up. 

Content generation/ management

Once you have generated a good image of your audience, using these techniques and any other good ones you can think of you have to create content that will attract them. The key with content is consistent and high value. Here are some tips on how to create unique, consistent content that will help you grow.

• Compare the popular type of content that is posted. 

Remember the 20% 80% rule. Does your page engage with its followers? They do not follow you to buy your goods every day, so, please, make your page a source of inspirational and useful information for them. Otherwise, you’ll lose your target audience. 

• Have a content plan and schedule 

A content creation template can help you create the right types of posts for the right audience. Your optimal content plan should contain different types of social media posts according to what they prefer: are these funny videos, motivational quotes, polls, or educational blog posts/infographics?

Your social media goal is to generate traffic, leads, and sales from social, but never forget about the relationships you build on there. Robust content is definitely not a reason for them to follow you, so spend some time and create a well-founded content plan. This is important if you’re setting up a social media calendar for a small business, yourself, or a larger brand.