5 Time-Tested Ways to Connect with your Ideal Target Market on Social Media

For businesses, there are so many social media platforms they can utilize to make a presence of their brand. Every social network has millions of people engaged, however all are unique and no two networks offer the same impact.

So, you need to know who your target audience is, and in which social platform to target them. Here we introduce five time-tested ways to connect with your target audience on social media.

  1. Know Your Target Audience

In spite of tall claims with ad-lines like ‘we know you’, many businesses (including many biggies) just do not know their target audience. Most of them have a vague idea about their audience and target market, and they just run a campaign on the basis of that. It obviously results in a huge loss of time, effort and resources.

To identify your target audience you need to create the persona profile of your buyers. There are too many variable elements to create buyer persona profiles. Here are some of the key considerations among them:

  • What kind of profile do you think matches your ideal customer?
  • What kind of demographic characteristics does your target market have (gender, location, ethnicity, etc.)?
  • Typical buying habits and engagement patterns of your ideal customer.
  • What is your ideal customer’s occupation?
  • What are the motivation factors for buying your products?
  • How do your customers decide on buying a product?

 

  1. Know User Demographics Across Social Networks

You have gotten to know your target audience by analyzing various constituent factors that create buyer persona, right? Now, it is time to find your ideal customers online across the social networks. To begin, you can study the user demographics of each channel.

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You have a product that is visually appealing and particularly targeted for women? Pinterest will be the right platform to find and target your audience besides others.

Similarly, do you want to address smartphone flaunting millennial? Just go to Instagram.

You want to target serious business audience or tech geeks? LinkedIn is the right platform for your purpose.

Do you want to catch up people belonging to most diverse demographic categories or no categories at all? Facebook as the largest and most mainstream of all social channels will be the irreplaceable choice for any business.

Now the last piece of advice would be using fewer social platforms instead of targeting too many. Initially, focus on two platforms and later on escalate to two more. Two to four platforms are enough for a brand presence and targeting audience.  

  1. Do Extensive Customer Research

You need to know existing and potential customers to make your social media presence shine through. You no longer need traditional market research for this. These days, available survey data and research reports on the use of social media by various types of people can easily help you know about the social engagements and interactions of your audience. Here is a checklist of what you need to know through customer research:

  • Which social platforms your existing customers are using.
  • Check out the social page of your competitor to have an idea of the channel users are most engaged with.
  • Now search with your target keywords on each platform and find the amount of engagement and frequency of posts related to this.
  1. Take Help from Social Media Insights

If you are not new to social platforms you know each social network offers insights on user engagement, viewership and community building metrics. Obviously, Facebook insights will differ from that of Twitter and Pinterest, but when you take into account these figures across the channels, you have a clear idea of where most of your target audience is.

Insights always show who are your most frequently engaged and satisfied audience. You can also have a deeper understanding by looking into related and cross-channel interests of people. For instance, people interested in fitness can easily be interested in contents related to organic health. Another way to do this is to see what competitor brands are doing on social platforms, and then targeting their followers.

  1. Continue Fine Tuning

Now when it comes to targeting your audience specifically, there is no limit to fine tuning this. When using social insights you can easily find another layer to come one step closer to your target audience.  For instance, you can find new ages or interest groups apart from the regular categories in social insights.

How can you really target your audience on social platforms that do not provide any vital information on the users? Snapchat is already well known for not offering any audience insights, and for other channels like Pinterest and Instagram, the scope can be very limited. In case you do not find all the data required to track your audience, just focus on the engagement and frequency of response from people and over a period of time you know where most of your audience is active.

To Conclude…
There is no hard and fast method for every business to spot their audience in social media channels. Such identification takes time and becomes possible by validating audience data and conducting customer research repeatedly.