How to Find Out Where Your Audience Is on Social Media

An audience or target market is the backbone of any social media marketing campaign.

While defining a certain demographic may appear simple, it is just the beginning of knowing your target audience. To properly understand where your audience is, you must dive deeper—discovering their requirements, difficulties, wants, and habits.

This guide will help you discover all of this and more. You'll also learn why identifying your target audience is critical and how to do it correctly for maximum impact.

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a certain population segment to which the marketing strategies of a brand, business, or organization are directed towards.

This population usually has common traits with the same characteristics such as age, gender, location, interests, behavior, or buying patterns.

For example, a sports clothing brand may focus on fitness fanatics between the ages of 16 to 35, whilst the luxury watches business may focus their attention on earning professionals.

Knowing these subtle, but important differences in audience helps in developing the creation of content, products, and promotions.

How to find your audience on social media

Start with extensive market research

Market research is a crucial part of understanding your industry and knowing what to expect from your business. This knowledge is what helps you understand market trends that affect your potential target audience.

Doing market research gets you information on who people are, what they lack, what platforms they are searching for products, what they buy, and why they buy it. This gives you the social framework to construct your ideal type of customer and know where to look for them.

Identify your buyer persona

Buyer personas are researched models of the ideal customers for your business. They are created from extensive market research to help you better understand your potential customers.

Every competent brand or business owner creates their buyer personas. To create one you have to ask yourself several questions such as:

• Who are my current customers?
• How old are they?
• Where do they live?
• How much do they earn?
• What are their jobs?
• What do they need?
• What problems does my product or service solve?

After answering these questions, you can look at your social media numbers to understand where to focus your efforts. These questions slowly help you build on what you want to know about your audience.

In the end, you will come up with one or more personas for your business, depending on the different types of products you offer.

Discover where your potential audience is most active

After creating and identifying your buyer personas, your next step is figuring out where your potential audience is most active.

To do this you have to look for communities online across each popular social media platform. Check on platforms like Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook. Depending on the kind of product and the service you offer, you may be obliged to look at more platforms than others.

For instance, viewers of the older generation tend to use the Facebook platform more, compared to other social media like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Knowing the social channels your audience likes to visit will help you prioritize which social media sites you should focus on. As you promote your brand, you learn as you go — and soon enough you know what works for each platform.

Watch your competitors

A good way to find your audience on social media is by watching your competition. Look at users who engage with them and see if they are your fit too.

Start by checking out who interacts with their posts and where their engagement comes from. Also, take note of the social media channels they use, their hashtags, likes, and follows. Chances are that they’ll be in contact with an audience who could also require your brands’ services.

Talk to your customers

Surveys help you find out who your real customers are and what social media networks they like to use. You can get straightforward answers to most of your pressing customer questions. You'll know exactly what type of content they consume, what social media sites they like to use, and what you can do to keep them interested.

You can also get information from existing and potential customers through reviews, and social media comments. As you conduct your reviews, look for patterns in questions or complaints to better understand your audience's requirements. Also, look for common themes using location and age groups to further identify your audience.

Use social listening tools

Social listening involves monitoring online conversations about your elements related to your products and services. This usually involves looking not only at your posts but how your brand is tagged with other content and the various interactions surrounding it.

Social listening tools are essential for this. These tools are used for listening to online chatter, documenting hashtags, and identifying keywords across platforms. They then generate real-time data showing insights into your audience preferences, ideal location, and discussions.

Upon analyzing this data, you can easily find out who and where your audience is on social media.

Does it matter?

Yes. Figuring out your audience is an unavoidable aspect of good social media marketing. You will need to have the right information on where to spend money and how to allocate your resources.

Every brand or business has a budget. And the key to using that budget effectively is to know exactly where it's going. Aside from this, making meaningful content on social media is impossible if you don't identify your audience.

You can keep on rolling out post after post, only to be met with low engagement and interactions because of marketing to the wrong audience. You should combine your digital and social resources to create a complete marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Your marketing strategy isn't complete without knowing where your audience is on social media. Follow these tips to locate your target audience for your business. With any luck, you'll be making profits in no time.