Your Social Media Tribe - Knowing Your Audience

Tribe, fans, audience, community, crowd, prospects, customers, followers, - no matter what you prefer to call them, defining your audience is 101 in developing your social media strategy.

But before we get started, if you haven't already read How to Start a Social Media Strategy That Works, I recommend you pause reading this article and head over to find out how to get started. Make sure you spend time working through the activities - and don't cheat!

Ready to keep going? Excellent, let's get started.

Audience Segmentation

There are many ways to segment your audience, and as you become familiar with your social strategy, you’ll understand more ways to use your audience data to improve your strategies. Social media platforms have fantastic technologies and functionality that allow you to target users based on audience segmentation, interests or affinities. The more you know about your audience(s), the better your targeting strategies. We’ll go into more detail about targeting strategies in future articles, but for now all you need to know is the high level breakdown of your audience.

Understanding your audience

To develop a killer social media strategy, it is vital you spend as much time as you can understanding everything there is to know about your audience. Uncovering their traits, interests, affinities, how they live their lives, what they like to do in their spare time as well as the common demographic, geographic and socioeconomic details will help you develop a complete picture of who you are currently, or trying to connect with.

Startups and ENTREPRENEURS 

If you are a startup this is even more important. Understanding who you want to connect with, and what they are already doing in their lives will help you make the smart choices for selecting the right social media platforms, the right targeting strategies, and for creating content and conversations that cut through and resonate with your audience.

Existing Businesses

If your business is already operating in-market, your current customer base is the best place to start for defining your social media audience. Why? Because these guys have already converted and purchased your product or service, and while not all customers are born equal, they are an excellent group to centre your strategies around, as you look to find more converting customers. If you are not sure where to start, look at your current customer base. Who are the main customers, this is your primary target market. Are there other people using your products or services, these are your secondary target market/s.  Not sure where to find this information? Look at your traditional customer service systems, you may have large customer relationship managers (CRMs) or simple spreadsheets of customer data. See what information you have on your customers, are they a certain age, located in a particular area, purchasing in the same catalogue of products or services? All of these factors will begin to shed light on your audience base. Don’t forget to think about the people that influence purchase decisions, and any other groups that are relevant to your specific business, these are your key influencers.

Why is this important?

Defining who you want to talk to, and engage with, helps you to identify where these people congregate, what information or content they are interested in consuming and what tone you should use. It's the same as traditional business, if you know your audience are senior executives, you would meet them in their boardroom not your dingy office without a view. You might present a presentation that has engaging graphs and images rather than long written reports because you understand they are extremely time poor, you may also present with a professional tone, as opposed to how you would converse with a friend at the local bar. This is the same for the content and conversations you have on social media. The more respect you have for your audience and their personal situations, the higher likelihood you will choose platforms, content and conversations that resonate with them.

Next steps

Now it's time for you to go through your audience strategy and make a reference document, slide, or if you are feeling fancy an infographic of your audience/s. You may like to have each audience on a different page or view, so that you can build up an understanding of each segment as more data, information and insights becomes available as you develop your business. 

Need Help?

If you would prefer to work with a professional to help get you started, feel free to reach out and I'll work with you to define your audience strategy.

Thanks, Carissa x