Defining Your Audience

By KayChatz Social Media 2 Comments on Defining Your Audience

Connecting with an audience, whether you’re a Non-Profit organization, Government Agency or a Business, could be challenging. Having a presence on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc, is not enough! You have to identify your audience. Get to know them. Understand them. Listen to what they are saying. How do you do this and how can you identify your audience? I have identified three important variables that could help answer those questions.

Influence

What is influencing your audience to connect with your organization? In order to identify your audience, you need to find out what exactly is influencing them. For Non-Profit organizations, it might be the awareness or donations that attracts the attention of an audience. Maybe they have a connection with the organization’s goal/mission. For businesses, influencers may be most affected by a celebrity. In CoverGirl’s commercials, they are always using a celebrity, like Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, etc, to attract consumers. I think this is an awesome tactic for businesses to help influence an audience. Lastly, Government Agencies should identify influential audiences, that would help them in campaigns, to create community support and thus increase voters.

Demographics

This is where you need to do your research! Find out where your audience is. How old are they? Where are they from? When do they use social media and what platforms are they even using? This will be different in all three sectors. Non-Profits, Governments and Businesses would all probably use Facebook, as Facebook is the most popular platform out there with 1 billion accounts. However, gender, age, ethnicity are factors that could be different for each. As an example for a Non-Profit organization, where the mission is, lets say, to raise awareness for women’s rights, having a presence on Facebook and Twitter is crucial and targeting women of all ages would be necessary. On the other hand, depending on your business, you have figure out if you want to attract males or females, and the age group. For example, a mechanic shop would most likely want to target men, above the age of 16. Lastly, Governments would probably want to target an audience above the teenage years – those who are able to vote! There are several free tools you can use to do all this research including:

Followerwonk – Twitter Analytics

Iconosquare – Instagram Analytics

Facebook Insights – Facebook Analytics

Relevancy

If your posts on any social media platform are not relevant to your organizations purpose, then you won’t have a happy or engaging audience. If I open up an Ice-Cream Shop, which has a presence on Twitter, and I send out tweets regarding fashion, that is clearly irrelevant, and thus would drive an audience away. But if you are tweeted about your flavours and how good they are, your audience will have a connection, and therefore, you will be able to define who they are! It needs to be consistently relevant! Non-Profits need to post relevant things pertaining to the over all goal of their organization, which should push their audience to donate. Businesses need to turn their audience into consumers/customers by being consistently relevant as well. Same thing for Governments. If your posts are irrelevant online, you won’t have a stable audience.

  • Share:

Leave a comment to kaychatz
Cancel Reply