DWI’s Social Media Strategy: Understanding Your Audience

Are you struggling to comprehend why your audience does certain things? Why might like one post, but not another, or why your growth on social media hasn’t translated to growth for your business? All of these can be hard questions to answer. Thankfully, they don’t have to be.

Taking the time to know and understand your audience will help you answer those questions and use social media more effectively, and it will help that audience grow in the future. Let’s look at how to start.

1. Figure out key facts about your audience. Before you go any further, take the time to find out some things about your audience, like average age, gender, location, and interests. This can be done by using an analytics tool, like Facebook’s, Instagram’s, YouTube’s, or Twitter’s.You can also see when most of your audience interacts with your content, so that you can know the best time to post. Doing these things can give you a good picture of what your audience looks like: maybe they’re a group of 18-25 year-old men from Gulf Coast who also like ESPN and are online from 9-11 PM, or maybe they’re a group of 45-60 year-old men from the Midwest who also like hunting who are online from 7-9 AM.
2. Where does your audience hang out? Now, let’s look at where most of your audience is. This information can also be found via an analytics tool. Take the time to find out where you have the largest audience— is it Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? Knowing this will help you know how best to delegate resources. After all, you don’t want to spend 5 hours a week on a social media platform that’s only reaching 500 people, when you could be spending the same amount of time on a different platform and reach 5,000.
3. What kind of content does your audience like? Once again, head back to the analytics! Look through past posts and see what gets the most audience interaction. Do your how-to videos do better than your behind-the-scenes photos? What about shared or curated content? Does it do better or worse than content your business creates? Figuring out these details now means better results for you down the road.
4. And finally, how can you make your audience grow? By now, you should have plenty of information on your audience— who they are, where they’re at, and what they like. Time to use all this information to understand what it means for your social media strategy going forward. Read our next post in this series to do just that.