2024 guide to finding the perfect social media target audience
The total global social media population is now about 5.17 billion. Trying to find your brand’s specific social media target audience from that enormous number of people can feel a bit overwhelming.
Learning who your audience is and what they’re looking for on social channels is the only way to stand out from the crowd. Narrowing your approach helps you build meaningful relationships with the people most interested in your brand.
Key Takeaways
- The term social media target audience refers to the specific group of people your brand aims to reach on social media, defined by characteristics such as demographics, interests, and their stage in the customer journey.
- Knowing your audience helps focus your messaging and efforts on the right platforms for better engagement.
- Social media analytics (including competitor analysis and industry research) can help you understand who your audience is, what they want, and how they engage with brands. Based on this information, you can defining personas and aligni them with your marketing goals.
What is a social media target audience?
A social media target audience is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the audience you want to target with your marketing message on social media. Understanding who your target audience allows you to:
- focus your messaging,
- concentrate your effort on the right platforms,
- and develop meaningful relationships that improve your social media ROI.
Bonus: Get the free template to easily craft a detailed profile of your ideal customer and/or target audience.
Types of social media target audiences
There’s no one right way to define your social media target audience. You might have different target audiences for different social media platforms, or even different campaigns.
The key is to define a group of people using a similar set of characteristics. Then you can speak to them in a way that makes sense based on their particular wants, needs, and pain points. Here are some typical factors to consider when defining your social media target audience.
- Demographics: Factors like age, gender, level of education, location, and income level are all good starting points for finding your target audience. Remember that here you are specifically focusing on social media. Your social media target audience may not have the same demographics as your target audience for other forms of marketing efforts.
- Interests: What types of things does your target audience like to do? What subjects get them excited? People come to social media to be entertained. Understanding what they find entertaining is a key way to define your target audience and draft content appropriately. For example, the Momofuku Goods Instagram account shares Momofuku recipes modified for home cooks. Of course, they incorporate Momofuku Goods products, but the recipes address a core interest rather than focusing on promotion:
Understanding their target audience’s interest in Momofuku recipes is a major contributing factor explaining why the Goods brand itself has 142,000 followers.
- Stage in the customer journey: Are you targeting existing customers? New customers? Potential customers who have visited your website but not bought anything? People who have abandoned a shopping cart? All of these groups need a different marketing message to complete the purchase process.
How do you identify your target audience on social media?
There is no shortage of data available to help you define your target audience on social media. You just need to know where to look. Here are the top ways to research your audience and narrow down the characteristics you want to target.
1. Check your business’s personas and marketing goals
If you have not already created buyer personas, you should do so as part of this exercise. If you already have those personas, get them out now. These define your ideal customer. Your social media target audience will not necessarily be exactly the same as your ideal customer base. But there will certainly be a lot of overlap.
Also consult your overall marketing goals. What is your marketing department trying to achieve? And how does social media contribute towards those goals? If you’re aiming to build brand awareness, your target audience may be broader than it would be if your core goal is sales conversions.
2. Analyze your existing social media audience
Social media analytics tools provide a wealth of information about who is already following and engaging with you on social media.
Again, your existing audience does not necessarily share all the common characteristics of your target audience. But knowing who already follows you – and especially who already engages with you – provides a lot of insight about how social media audiences in general categorize your brand, product, or service.
You can get this information for individual social channels using native analytics built into the tools (as long as you have set up business accounts). Or you can use a tool like Hootsuite Analytics to track and compare your audience on various platforms. You can also learn when they are most likely to be active on each platform so you can post at the right time.
Hootsuite Listening includes even more detailed audience demographics analytics. You get a full picture of who’s interested in your brand on social media.
Don’t stop by figuring out who your audience is. Take things a step further by using these same social analytics tools to figure out what they want from specific social channels.
3. Peep on your competitors
Your social media target audience will not be exactly the same as that of your competitors. You are unique, after all! But understanding who your competitors are targeting can help you get a think about how to reach your target audience on social media in new ways.
Hootsuite Analytics provides some good basic research capability here. Using the competitive benchmarking features, you can see how many fans your competitors have. You’ll also learn how their audience size is changing. This can give you a sense of the potential audience for you to target.
You can also see which posts (and types of posts) are performing best. Plus there’s a word cloud of the top hashtags based on engagement goals. Combing through these hashtags can help you uncover niche communities for you to include in your social media target audience.
Hootsuite Listening provides even more useful data here. It uses social listening powered by artificial intelligence to reveal how people feel about your competitors, as well as your own brand.
You can dig in to see what kind of competitor content resonates with the groups you’re trying to reach, and what falls flat. You can then identify the most relevant trends and conversations. This helps identify specific interests and even accounts to include in your own social media target audience!
4. Research your industry on social media
Taking a broader look at your industry on social media will help you understand what kind of content your potential audience is looking for. You can work backwards from here to deduce some key characteristics about the potential audiences for you to target.
Hootsuite Listening is a useful tool here as well. It can help you understand what topics people in your industry are talking about while digging into your potential audience’s like and dislikes.
At the same time, look for gaps in the conversation. Are there any underrepresented topics that you could dominate? If yes, think about the characteristics of the people who would be most interested in this approach. They’re a target audience that is currently underserved.
You can also identify important influencers in your industry niche. Taking a closer look at their content can help you think about your niche in a different way. Are they using approaches you hadn’t considered to target groups you may not have targeted before?
Finally, look at the bigger picture of how social media users are engaging with brands like yours. Are they likely to make purchases through social links? Or are they primarily looking for information? Knowing what your customers want and expect on social channels from brands in your industry can help you narrow the audience to target.
How to reach your target audience on social media
Once you have a sense of who your social media target audience is, it’s time to think about how to reach them on social media.
Set up shop on the right platforms
Demographics are a good starting point here. Check out our social media demographics post to find the platform(s) that best align with the target audience you want to reach.
But remember that this is just a starting point. You will need to do some testing to see which platforms work best for your particular brand and your specific social media target audience.
Your competitor analysis can provide some useful guidance here too. If your competitors are active and engaged on a particular platform, it’s likely worth your time to try it as well.
Remember, your audience may use different platforms for different purposes. Meet them where they are with the kind of content they want there.
For example, on TikTok, Ikea USA embraces Brat Summer and does a take on the “Looking for a Man in Finance” trend:
@ikea_usa step aside
♬ original sound – IKEA USA, there’s a new bear in town #lookingforamaninfinance #songofthesummer
Neither of these very memey posts appear on the Ikea USA Instagram account. But this preview of Halloween items appears on both channels, since it speaks to a broader target audience:
Find your brand voice
Once you understand who your social media target audience is, you can learn to speak their social media language.
Your brand voice should be relatively consistent across all marketing channels. That said, the casual and conversational nature of social media allows you more freedom to play with your voice than you may have in other formats. A more conversational voice also helps to encourage engagement and develop relationships with your target audience over time.
Wendy’s is well-known for its cheeky brand voice on social media. Especially when responding to content by and about competitive brands.
They’re completely engaged in the conversations on their social posts, too, maintaining the same strong voice throughout. It’s relatable, authentic brand conversation that keeps the audience active and engaged.
Source: @wendys
Staying relatable and true to your brand is critical: 56% of consumers think that brands should be more relatable on social. And 68% said that inauthentic content has caused them to unfollow or hide a brand in the last 12 months.
Not sure what to say with that well-developed brand voice? Generative AI tools like OwlyWriter AI can help you come up with relevant content ideas using the right tone to connect with your audience.
Build an engaged following
When you focus specifically on connecting with your social media target audience, you’re likely to bring in followers who engage with your content. If you speak directly to their wants and needs, in the right voice, on the right platform, odds are much higher that they’ll like, comment, save, and share.
So, simply by understanding your target audience and developing the right kind of content for them, you’re taking a step toward building an engaged following. But there are also some specific steps you can take to connect with the right potential followers:
- Create consistent, visually appealing content that is easily recognizable as your brand
- Optimize your social profiles. Help your audience understand what to expect from you and why they should follow
- Keep an eye on trends your audience is engaging with. Use Hootsuite Listening to spot relevant memes, hashtags, and trending topics
- Post when your social media target audience is active online. Hootsuite’s customized Best Time to Publish recommendations can solve this mystery!
- Understand the algorithms to increase your chances of being seen by new people
- And don’t neglect social SEO. People who are searching for content like yours are likely members of your target audience
Run targeted social ads
Once you identify your social media target audience, you’re in a great position to create highly targeted social ads. The more narrowly you define your ad audience, the higher your ROI is likely to be.
No matter how well you understand the algorithms and social SEO, not all of your organic content will be seen by the members of your target audience you most want to reach. Targeted social ads are an easy way to guarantee your content reaches the right eyeballs. We’ve got a full guide on how to target your ads on Facebook. Many of the tips apply across platforms.
One ad targeting option is to target people who have recently interacted with your social content. Shortly after ogling the recipes on the MomofukuGoods account, I was served an ad for their signature noodles in an Instagram Stories ad.
Source: @momofukugoods
This type of remarketing is a good way to keep your brand top of mind for members of your social media target audience who have not yet followed your accounts.
3 tips for building a meaningful relationship with your target audience
1. Know what your audience likes
As we’ve already said, knowing what your audience wants to see from you is a key reason for figuring out who your social media target audience is in the first place.
In general, people want brands to be relatable and entertaining. But there are significant differences in the specifics of what different target audiences want from their brand content.
For example, Baby Boomers put higher value on inspirational content and brand engagement, while Gen Z places higher value on creativity, entertainment, the visual aesthetic, and “good vibes.”
Source: Hootsuite Social Media Consumer Report 2024
Remember: Researching your social media target audience gets you beyond these “in general” statements so you can craft content specifically for your audience.
Hootsuite Listening provides a treasure trove of information here. You get personalized insights on your brand to reveal what conversations are already happening, and how people really feel about you. You’ll see what the most popular positive and negative posts are about so you can give the people more of what they want while addressing concerns that might be starting to emerge.
2. Engage, engage, engage
If you want your social media target audience to engage with you, you’ve got to engage with them. Building a relationship is a two-way street.
Unfortunately this is something too many brands neglect, and audiences hate it. In the 2024 Hootsuite Social Media Trends Report, 27% of respondents said that poor engagement with public comments or direct messages has a negative impact on how they view brands they follow. Twenty-six percent said the same about slow responses to messages.
Source: Hootsuite Social Media Trends 2024
We get it: It’s hard to keep on track of comments and messages coming in across multiple platforms. A tool like Hootsuite Inbox is a huge help here, since it consolidates all the private and public messages from your social media target audience in one place, making sure you never miss a thing.
3. Test new ideas and approaches
It can be tempting to sit on your laurels once you get into a groove on social media. But things change fast, and your audience expects you to keep up. Testing should be an ongoing component of your social media marketing strategy.
So what kinds of new ideas and approaches should you test? Again, looking to your competitors can be a great source of inspiration. Research tools like Hootsuite Listening also help you spot new trends and approaches as they emerge, so you can get in on new ideas before they become oversaturated.
Whenever you test something new, be sure to keep a close eye on your analytics, especially for social sentiment. This will let you know whether your social media target audience appreciates your innovation or thinks you’ve gone off the rails.
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