How to find your social media target audience.

Defining your social media audience is important to identify and understand your niche so you can dominate it.

A target audience is a specific group of consumers characterized by behavior and specific demographics as location, age, gender, employment and income that you want to reach with your social channels. The people most likely to be interested in your content, products, or services.

For example, female entrepreneurs between the ages 20 and 40.

As your business becomes bigger and clearer, your research and insights will be able to define your target audience in more detailed and be specific.

You can sell to everyone, but you can’t target everyone with your content. What does this mean? Your content wont spark interest in everyone because “everyone” is too wide of an audience, too many different interests and personalities. Put it this way, you don’t follow everyone that comes across your Instagram, right? So, the same goes both ways, not everyone is going to follow you because their interests wont necessarily match with your offerings.

Target audiences are the pillar of most businesses influencing decision making for marketing strategy, such as where to spend money on ads, how to appeal to customers, and even what product to build next.

This information is helpful in understanding the customer and how they make purchase decisions. Targeting a specific audience will also help your campaigns reach the correct people who will relate most to your company’s message and products. Nowadays, it has become easier to target specific audiences with the tools social media already offers.

These are some steps you can follow to define your target audience:

1. Identify or create buyer personas

A lot of the demographics can be found by looking into your analytics. Look at your social media insights. Then ask, what are my audience’s pain points? Or What problems does my product or service solve?

You can further consider facts as spending power, spending patterns, and their state of life. This information is important to understand how customers interact on social media and make their purchases.

If you sell more than one product or service, you will have different personas.

2. Find out where your audience is most active

As you have different social media platforms, the audience might be different on each one of them. Figuring out where tour audience is will help you prioritize which social media platform you want to focus on.

3. Look at your competitors

What kind of voice are they using? Who are they appealing to? Who is responding to their posts and engaging with them. What social networks are they active on? Who are the top followers? What hashtags they use?

By looking at who is responding to their posts and engaging with them.

4. Survey your customers

Ask them the questions you need to know the answers to, like what type of content they consume, what social media sites they prefer, and who do they follow.

I hope this is a good start if you are trying to understand what does target audience mean and how can you start defining yours. Let me know if there is anything I can help you with.