How to Research and Locate Your Audience Using Social Media

The world of social is like a parallel universe. People have different personalities from their real world avatars. When you share a post or update on social media, it is very important that it resonates with the right target audience for the content to achieve its purpose. So how do you ensure your content finds the apt readers? Research and locate your audience before you post. Here's how

1)      Zero in your first experimental target audience

If you have a general product like jewelry for women, you are looking at a really big section for outreach and may end up spreading yourself too thin. Zeroing in by age is the first segment. Even then, you can start by first choosing one or two locations that are likely to have the maximum concentration of your TA – mostly tier 1 metro cities. These two demographic segmentation are available with most platforms. The next segmentation will be with psycho-graphics. You can find relevant interest groups and use these for targeting

2)      Use advanced targeting via social ad platforms

Facebook is a great tool to find audience who have similar interests. If you specify a target group of people who have already bought from you, you will have an option to target similar people. This exercise will involve finding your 'ideal customer' and then locating others similar to them. You will have to go beyond woman in her thirties and identify her hobbies, interests, spending patterns, family size, and shopping preferences. Once you add these preferences into a tool like the Facebook ads platform, it will help you determine your total audience size - that can be expected to show interest in your product online (and use Facebook). If this number is too big, you might need to narrow down further so that your ad spend does not wear too thin. On the contrary, if this number is too small, you shall need to widen your criteria to net a sizable audience who can help create enough statistics to see if your product is working or not.

     3) Check offline and then target online

When you create your customer's persona, try to link it with a real offline person and where you expect to find people like him. You many need a few marketing interns to take up the job to run a simple survey with your target customers. You can ask them which social platforms they use and their other preferences on online behavior like reading and shopping. As an interesting reward for participating in the survey, you can give out simple discount coupons. It will be perfect to test out if your offline mapping of customer personality also translates to online customer buying.

If a physical survey is not feasible, you can always run the survey online using free tools like Survey Monkey (as it gives out some neat analytics) or using Google forms.

Let us know what tactics have worked for you beyond Twitter and Facebook. Do you have a great tactic for Google plus? Share with us