How to Find and Reach Your Target Audience on Social Media

As a marketer, having prior knowledge of your social media target audiences is crucial if you want to get the most out of your marketing strategies. Social media has become one of the most favored channels by businesses in reaching a wider group of target audiences. 

With its continuous user-base growth, smart features intended for pinpointing specific demographics, fully accessible platforms, and easy-to-use user interfaces, it’s the perfect tool that every business could ever ask for.

Running a marketing agency at this time and age requires you to exhaust all channels that your client’s target customers are using, and that includes social media. You need to plan how to reach your target audience on social media if you want to help elevate your online presence and do the same to your clientele.

This article will focus on the surefire ways to reach your target audiences on social media more effectively. 

But first, let’s take a look at what a target audience means.

What is a Target Audience?

Target audience is a blanket term referring to a specific group of individuals who are most likely to be in favor of your products and services. It is important that businesses, specifically marketing firms, ensure that these individuals are able to see their marketing campaigns or the ads of their clientele. 

One surefire way to achieve this is by implementing a social media target audience analysis to help categorize prospects by their age, gender, location, interests, generation (whether they are Boomers, Millennials, Gen Z, etc…), or even their status in life. (More on this later).

How to Find Your Target Audience on Social Media?

Researching for target audiences on social media is easy. However, you shouldn’t stop there or find satisfaction with just finding where your target customers are. You must have a solid step-by-step plan to make the most out of every carefully researched group of prospects. Take a look at these five effective ways on how to target your audience on social media.

1. Come Up with a Buyer Persona

The sheer number of social media users makes it all the more difficult to gain relevant traction on your pages. Sure, you may have individuals checking out your content or subscribing to your client’s pages, but was the targeting accurate?

As discussed above, analyzing and categorizing target customers per demographic helps narrow down marketing campaigns and social media pages to the intended and appropriate audience. 

Creating a buyer persona helps you narrow down the segments that revolve around your target demographics. This allows you to identify your target audience’s pain points and consequently come up with campaigns or even products that are aligned with their needs and preferences.

Buyer personas can be created based on data analytics, collated insights, crowdsourcing, purchasing pattern and behavior, and other relevant information that shows a concise preview of a specific consumer which then enables you to identify target audiences on social media.

Furthermore, aside from using age, gender, or location as your basis for persona creation, you can also be more precise in creating your buyer persona by considering specific traits such as spending power and purchasing patterns.

2. Do Intensive Market Research

One of the best ways to reach a broader group of target audiences on social media is to conduct intensive research on the latest trends favored by your prospects. Determine the most in-demand products and services and look for openings where your services can fit. 

Let’s face it, not all of us can maneuver social media like others can do. If you are not well-versed with how to maximize social networking platforms for your market research, hiring a social media manager can be considered a viable option.

Take a look at the scenario below:

A marketing firm is new to using social media. So the business decides to hire a social media manager to go digging on different social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram to have enough knowledge of the up-and-coming trends that appeal to a broader group of audience and figure out where their campaigns would resonate with their intended audience the best.

Find trends where your products and services are related. Compare how well your services do in the market as opposed to other brands with similar niches. In doing so, you will know what areas in your marketing strategies need reassessing or revamping.

By taking the time to learn about what makes each social platform unique and appealing to users, it creates an impression of the age group and lifestyles of people that the business could potentially reach there. Say, on Twitter, brands that have a continuous presence in the so-called Twitterverse are those that cater to customers in their early 20s to mid-30s, and typically use the platform for leisure. While on Linkedin, most of the users are either professionals, business owners, or job seekers. 

The more you understand the specific “culture” and groups of individuals who make up each social media channel, the better you can pinpoint ways to segregate your market from the digital community.

3. Do Competitor Research

In addition to doing intensive online digging, conducting competitor research is yet another fool-proof way to flesh out prospects generated from social networks. Look at specific demographics where their products and services leave the strongest impact. 

Skim through their social media pages to see who’s engaging and responding to their posts. Consider checking what social media platforms generate the most engagements and what kinds of individuals comprise their top followers. Finally, check what hashtags they use on a specific post. Hashtags typically reveal on-trend keywords that could prove useful when you compose posts for your pages.

Albeit following your competitors might seem like a subtle way of copying what they do, that isn’t exactly the case. It is a practical way to keep up with current market trends and focus areas. Most of the time, researching and digging deeper into readily available resources saves more time while also helping you hone your products and services’ unique values.

4. Know Which Social Media Platform You Should Focus On

Finding target audiences on social media is a lot easier if you are able to figure out which social media platform they use more frequently.

Facebook is by far the leading social media platform used by internet users today. Statistics show that 30% of its 2.23 billion monthly users are aged 25 to 34 years old. These numbers alone prove that Facebook is an ideal channel to increase engagements (unless you are selling to senior citizens, then that’s a different story).

As for Twitter, a survey suggested that 37% of Twitter users are between the ages of 18 and 25; while 25% are aged 30 to 49. This means that Twitter is more appealing to younger audiences. That said, make sure that your tweets and posts are interesting enough to entice audiences of this age.

Much like Twitter, Instagram appeals to younger audiences, too. 

Contrastingly, because it is solely a photo-sharing social media platform, Instagram is said to be more appealing to female audiences. 

To be more precise, 39% of its users are women while 30% are male and most of them are Millennials. This ratio will give you an idea of which posts will pique the interest of this type of audience.

The moment you can pinpoint which platform your target audiences prefer, you instantly get a heads’ up on the social networks that you should prioritize. From there, you can easily adjust and segregate content that performs well from those that do not. Then, reassess posts with low engagement and improve these posts further.

5. Use Facebook Groups

As mentioned, Facebook is the leading social media platform on the internet right now. Finding your target audience is rather easy by joining niche-focused groups. 

This is one of the best ways to familiarize yourself with your prospects. Not only do you learn about the tone they use and prefer along with the posts that pique their interests, but you are also presented with the opportunity to bridge the gap between you and your target audience.

Final Thoughts

Social media is one of the best channels for reaching a wider group of prospective buyers. It allows you to pinpoint your target audience and scale your strategies seamlessly based on their preferences and needs. Moreover, in this digitized setup, social media provides a space where businesses can improve their engagement rates while continuously learning about their target audiences.

On a different note, did you know that you don’t have to do this alone?

New Media Services has top-notch social media management services. We specialize in assisting SMEs to market their online presence by improving their overall social media engagements. From increasing ROI to generating more sales and leads, to raising brand awareness online, our social media management team ensures that you achieve your social media marketing goals in no time.

Do you want to know more about our social media management services? Contact us now!