Create more content that they care about! Duh!
If that sounds like a frustrating circle with no end, you might be approaching things from the wrong direction. To create content that your audience cares about, you need to know what your audience cares about — but to know that, you first need to know who your audience really is.
Whether you’re an aspiring influencer, entrepreneur, artist, or small business, understanding your target audience on your social media channels is essential to growth. You have to figure out not just who you want to reach through social media but also, more importantly, what makes them tick.
Strategically targeting your specific audience with your content is the single most important thing you can do to boost your engagement, increase your followers, and grow your brand.
Here are some of our best tips for how to get started with and/or enhance your audience research so you can better find, reach, and engage your most valuable followers.
A target audience is the group of followers, subscribers, viewers, or readers who can benefit the most from your content or product. They’re the ones who find your stuff the most appealing or valuable and the ones most likely to engage with you and share your posts. And they’re the ones who will become loyal followers/customers and help your business or profile grow.
In other words, your target audience is the key to making sure your social media channels are getting as many views and as much valuable engagement possible.
Why is that the case? Well, the better you know your audience, the better you can target them. You’ll understand much more deeply what interests them, what they care about, what they need, what they want. You’ll know the kinds of struggles they can relate to and the kind of content that can help them and/or entertain them the most.
In other words, when you identify and target a very specific audience with similar concerns, goals, and tastes, you can hone in on producing more valuable content for them.
Valuable content for your audience translates into value for you.
There are a couple approaches to identifying who your ideal target audience is. For example, if you’ve already got an established social media presence, one approach is to better understand who your current audience is. You may think you have a target audience in mind already… but that may or may not line up with who’s actually viewing your content!
Use your social media analytics to analyze your current audience. For example, for Instagram, you can go to the Insights section on the app and then click on Audience for stats on your followers’ gender, age, and location. YouTube’s Analytics can give you fantastic info about who’s viewing your videos as well.
Your target audience may not be who you expect. Maybe you’ll discover you’re particularly popular in a certain country or city, or among an age group you weren’t expecting. This is valuable information to have, because you can now work on growing that audience group even more.
Another approach to identify your target audience is to start with a broad audience (e.g., people who like cars) and then narrow it down as much as possible (e.g., environmentally conscious women age 24-35 who use their car to explore the outdoors).
In marketing, it’s common to come up with what’s called a “buying persona” — an example of an individual target customer. You can do the same thing for your target audience on social media, even if you aren’t specifically selling something (yet).
Take the time to describe for yourself someone in your target audience with as much detail as possible. For example, questions you should ask and have answers for include:
Your target audience is probably already among your current audience. But they probably have mixed feelings about your content right now, since not all of your content really relates to or interests them.
Once you have defined your ideal target audience with as much detail as possible, it’s time to start tailoring your social media content to them as much as possible. That’s one of those things that’s easier said than done, though. How do you really know what kind of content they want to see and the best way to reach them?
If you want to reach and engage your target audience, you have to find them and meet them where they already are.
Here are a few strategies to try:
Start stalking them. Ok, don’t literally stalk anyone. But start clicking on and scrolling through your audience’s public profiles. Check out the profiles and feeds for the people who are following you, and especially those who are commenting, sharing, and otherwise engaging with your latest posts. What are they posting on their own profile? What types of content do they share? How do they write and communicate — what sort of voice do they use? (slang, emojis, capitalization, etc?)
Who else are they following? You might learn about some competitors or other similar accounts you hadn’t seen before. You’ll also learn about the other things that interest them (for example: maybe a lot of your vegan cooking followers are following space travel accounts too. Who would have expected that?)
Ask them directly. Send a DM to one of your followers who seems to line up really well with your target audience persona. Thank them for following you and ask them for a little feedback — what types of content do they love? Are there things they’d like to see more of (or less of)? A direct DM to an individual will make them feel personally noticed and engaged, and they’ll be more likely to reply. But of course, broader audience surveys are always an option too (Instagram Polls are a great feature, for example).
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Get ideas and inspiration from those competitors or other accounts that are also appealing to your own target audience. What types of content do they get the most engagement on? Without directly stealing from them, you can get ideas of things to try. (For example, if a competitor is getting a lot of engagement on inspirational quote posts, maybe you could experiment with integrating those into your feed too.)
Follow the hashtag trails. Check out and take note of what hashtags your followers are using, as well as those on the other accounts they’re following. Work those hashtags into your own posts, of course. But take it a step further and go exploring, too. Click on and follow those hashtags yourself and see who else is using those hashtags, how, and why. You’ll get a lot of great information and ideas this way.
Find out where else your audience hangs out. Remember, the internet’s a big place, and most people use more than one social media channel. Your audience may be most active on Instagram or YouTube, but they go other places, too. Are there discussion forums, websites, or Facebook Groups where they’re active? One way to learn this is to identify what keywords and search terms your audience is using, and then search for them yourself in Google and see the other places and forums where those topics come up. What are they posting and chatting about there, and is it different from how they interact on their main social media channel?
Don’t just observe… Join in. All the above techniques are great for observing your target audience and finding out what they care about. But it’s not enough to just be on the outside looking in — you need to jump into the conversation yourself.
Play an active role in the community and become part of the very audience you want to attract.
Comment on posts that your audience creates. Like and engage with comments and posts from your competitors and similar accounts, too. Not in an annoying self-promotion way (“Hey check out my video!!”), but in a genuine way that another follower would (“Love this!”). You will tap into a community more naturally this way.
Hopefully, through this whole research process, you’ve been taking lots of notes for yourself. You’ll have much more information on what your audience likes to see and what interests them. Now, you can start building your future posts around that valuable research — and watch your audience and engagement grow!
Finding and targeting your ideal audience is the secret to social media growth. Learn as much as you can about the audience you already have, and then dive deeper into exploring where they hang out and what they care about. Spend time browsing their profiles, the other accounts they follow, the communities they hang out in, the hashtags they use, and the search terms they use. And interact with your audience as much as possible — not just on your own social media channel, but in the places they hang out, too. Like and comment on their posts and on the posts for similar accounts. Take notes and then start making content from what you’ve learned!
Are you ready to build stronger connections with your audience and more?
Toosa, a powerful new audience communication platform, will be launching soon. Don’t miss out! Get on the waiting list now for updates and find out how to be one of Toosa’s first users.