Social media audience analysis: An easy tactical guide for 2025
Who is your social media audience, really? Beyond their demographic details, do you understand their attitudes, values, and goals? What about their pain points and problems?
Done right, social media audience analysis goes beyond the basics. It can give you actionable insights to drive your social strategy.
In this post, we’ll share tactical tips to help you understand specific audience data points, including:
- where to find them,
- what they can tell you, and
- how to use this information to refine your social media marketing efforts and improve ROI.
Key takeaways
- Social media audience analysis is about more than just demographics. It uncovers audience attitudes, values, and pain points, and helps marketers tailor more effective social strategies.
- By identifying and targeting unique audience segments—whether through tailored messaging, showing up on specific platforms, or partnering up with the right creators—brands can resonate with their ideal customers on a more personal level.
What is social media audience analysis?
Social media audience analysis starts with collecting audience data. Then, you analyze that data for insights to guide your social marketing strategy.
Audience analysis on social media helps brands understand:
- Who your audience is on social media
- Where they spend their time online
- What your audience is looking for from the social accounts they follow
- How you can position your brand to meet their needs and build a loyal and engaged social media community
This process involves the use of a few social media audience analysis tools:
- Social media analytics tools to reveal audience demographic information (and other characteristics)
- Social listening tools to understand audience needs, wants, preferences, and values
- Competitive analysis tools for insights about the potential audience in your industry or niche
7 audience insights you can get from social media
1. Audience demographics
These are the basic characteristics of your audience – things like age, gender, language, and location.
This information is important in helping to craft the outline of your social content strategy, even though it lacks the nuance of the other insights we’ll talk about in this post.
How to get these insights
You can find this information in the native analytics tools of most social media platforms, or in a dedicated social media analytics tool.
How to action these insights
- Select imagery for your social media content that best represents your audience.
- Begin to define your brand voice so it speaks directly to your audience.
- Target the relevant demographics with social media ads, or use your existing audience for lookalike ad targeting.
2. Audience psychographics
While demographics give you the outlines of who your audience is, psychographics fill in the details of what they care about. Understanding their interests and values helps you position your brand more effectively by highlighting ways your values align.
This kind of alignment is critical for building ongoing brand loyalty, community, and trust. Brand alignment forms part of the consumer’s identity: 63% of 28-to-43-year-olds say they feel a connection to people who use the same brands they do. And 45% of the same age group says they judge people based on the brands they use.
Source: 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer
How to get these insights
Social listening tools help you uncover the topics your audience is most interested in. You’ll see detailed reports of top interests. Plus, you can track relevant conversations, topics, and hashtags over time.
How to action these insights
- Flesh out your buyer personas.
- Refine your brand voice to align with your audience’s preferences and values.
- Use an AI tool to generate content ideas based on your audience’s interests.
- Implement an A/B testing plan to learn which types of marketing campaigns resonate most with your audience.
3. Audience behaviors
This information is critical to understanding where to focus your social media efforts. Where does your audience spend their time on social media?
The average social media user spends time on seven social networks every month. You don’t need to reach them on all seven. But you do need to know which ones they use for product discovery and brand research.
You also need to know when they’re most active, so you can post your content at the right time to maximize engagement. When and how is your audience most likely to engage?
Behavior analysis can also help you understand how social media impacts your customer journey. Is it primarily about brand awareness? Or should you be aiming to nudge your audience toward conversion behaviors?
How to get these insights
You can access some basic information about audience behaviors through native analytics tools built into the social platforms. For off-platform behaviors (including shopping and conversion behaviors), you’ll need a dedicated social media analytics tool (like Hootsuite) or web analytics tool (like Google Analytics).
If you’ve connected your social media to your CRM, that’s another data resource!
How to action these insights
- Schedule your social content to post at the most effective time for your desired social goal.
- Narrow your focus on the social media channels where you’re most likely to connect with your audience.
- Tailor your promotional social content to the relevant stage in the purchase journey for each platform (Remember that only about 20% of your content should be promotional!). This can include everything from keyword choice to content type.
4. Audience pain points, motivations, and new product ideas
Now that you know what your potential customers like, it’s time to think about what they don’t like.
What problems is your ideal customer is trying to solve? What’s not working for them right now? This could be a consistent problem customers are having with your products and services. Or it could be an area where your competitors are falling short.
How to get these insights
Find these social conversations using a social listening and competitor analysis tool. To identify pain points and market gaps, monitor relevant:
- keywords
- topics, and
- hashtags.
Combine these with sentiment analysis to identify areas of audience concern.
How to action these insights
- Listen to your audience: If they’re asking for new features, products, or services, pass that information on to your product development team.
- Look for trends in negative comments about your brand, your services, or your products. Is there an issue you need to fix?
- Look for gaps in the social conversation, and in the market.
5. Audience segments
Your audience is not a monolith. And the detailed targeting options built into both organic and paid social media mean you don’t have to treat them that way.
Different people may be interested in your brand for different reasons. For example, some Adidas fans are serious athletes looking for performance footwear and athletic gear.
You’ll achieve better connection with each audience segment if you connect to them on their terms.
How to get these insights
Scan conversations on social media to uncover clusters of conversations, keywords, and hashtags and identify existing communities that are relevant to your product.
How to action these insights
- Plan how to connect with each audience segment most effectively. This may mean using targeting options within social platforms. Or, you could choose to focus on different audience segments on different platforms or with different accounts (like Adidas does)..
- Consider an influencer strategy to connect with audience segments that do not align completely with your typical followers, or to extend your reach to new audiences that may not yet be aware of your brand.
6. (Nuanced) brand sentiment
Any degree of brand sentiment analysis is useful. But the more nuanced you can get, the better. Brand sentiment goes beyond mentions and engagement volume to track how people actually feel about your brand on social media.
Even a basic sentiment analysis can help you nip a developing crisis in the bud, or identify a viral post in the making.
More nuanced analysis gives you a deeper understanding of the relationship between your brand and your audience over time. Rather than just positive and negative markers, look for emotions like anger, sadness, joy, fear, and surprise.
How to get these insights
You’ll need an advanced social listening tool to access this level of data (see our recommendations below).
How to action these insights
- Analyze emotions you may not have expected, like anger or surprise. Compare the trends in emotion to your content calendar to identify content that triggered these emotions. Then do some testing to see if you can pinpoint which elements of your content caused the change.
- Keep a particular eye out for major spikes. If your audience is suddenly angry, you need to do something fast to make it right.
Bonus: Discover the best way to gather insights and intel from your audience, competitors, industry, and favorite aspirational brands in our complete guide to advanced social listening.
7. Competitor audience insights
Even with all the data we’ve talked about so far, it’s tough to truly understand the potential of your social media audience without looking at your competitors’ audiences too.
Social media target audience analysis can help you understand how you compare to your competitors in terms of:
- audience size
- audience behaviors
- engagement levels
- social sentiment
- social share of voice
Especially when you’re just getting started, this information helps provide realistic goalposts for your social media strategy. As you get more experienced with audience analysis, social media competitor tracking can uncover strategic intelligence that helps you better understand your unique value in the industry.
How to get these insights
Look for a social media analytics tool that includes competitor benchmarking features. In your social listening tool, monitor competitor names and hashtags. Keep an eye on industry keywords and hashtags to identify new competitors as they emerge.
How to action these insights
- Monitor what types of content get the best audience engagement for your competitors, and look for ways to learn from their successes and flops.
- Check whether your competitors have tapped into existing social communities that may also be a fit for your brand. For example, say you’re a furniture or home supplies brand and your competitors have beat you to #DIYtok. Once you see whether that content is working for them, you can decide whether to create relevant DIY-themed TikTok content of your own.
The best social media audience analysis tools for 2025
You’ll need some tools to access all the data points required for a solid social media audience analysis. Here are our top picks.
1. Hootsuite Listening
With Hootsuite Listening, you can track what people are saying about you, your top competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last 7 days.
And if you want to take social listening to the next level, upgraded listening can show you sentiment over time, top influencers in your space, audience demographics, and much more.
Coolest feature: Hootsuite LIstening uses comprehensive AI designed specifically for social media to analyze and summarize data and conversations for easy access to top insights.
Cost: Every Hootsuite plan (starting at $99/month) includes everything you need to get started with social listening for audience analysis. Upgraded social listening is available as an add-on to Enterprise plans. Interested in a free demo? Book one now.
2. Talkwalker
Talkwalker helps you identify audience psychographics, preferences, and sentiment, alongside detailed audience segmentation details.
You can compare existing audience segments to identify similarities and differences that guide your social messaging for each group. Or identify new audiences through a streamlined discovery workflow.
Coolest feature: Ability to track conversion patterns for specific audience segments, so you better understand how to target your most valuable followers and improve ROI.
Pricing: Available on request
3. Hootsuite Analytics
Hootsuite Analytics collects your stats and audience demographics from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. You can set up custom boards that give you an overview of your most important audience growth metrics and demographics at a glance, over a select period of time.
Coolest feature: Find out when your audience is online and get personalized recommendations for your best times to post for each of your accounts, based on your specific goals.
Pricing: Hootsuite Analytics is included in all Hootsuite plans (starting at $99/month).
4. Google Analytics
Source: Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps you understand how audiences who discover your brand on social media behave once they reach your website. You can see traffic patterns, understand which social content drove the most web visits, and track conversion goals.
Tip: Learn how to connect Google Analytics to Hootsuite or set up Google Analytics to track your social accounts.
Coolest feature: Narrow your audiences for analysis based on specific behaviors and demographics.
Pricing: Free
5. Brandwatch
Source: Brandwatch
Access historical and real-time data to gain valuable insights into your social media audience. Built-in AI tools help identify trends and insights, analyze images, and segment data automatically.
Tip: Learn how to integrate Brandwatch with Hootsuite.
Coolest feature: The Brandwatch database draws from 100 million unique sites and 1.7 trillion historical conversations dating back to 2010.
Pricing: Available on request
Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor social media conversations and keywords, so you can focus on taking action on the insights available. Try it free today.
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