To grow your audience, you do need to know where to find your audience. Most people in your audience are active on a social media platform (or two, or five).
Fortunately for you, this makes social media a great place to find new audience members.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out where your audience hangs out on social media and how to attract them to your content and interest them in what you have to offer.
Who Is Your Social Media Audience?
Before you can find them, you need to identify your audience. You need to know who they are, what they want and how that relates to your product or service.
The first thing you should know is your customer demographics. These tell you a lot about your ideal customer, such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Job title
- Income
- Homeowner or renter?
- Married or single?
- Do they have kids?
- Do they have pets?
- Where do they live?
- Do they live in a house, an apartment or other dwelling?
All of this matters because it affects how you talk to them. In the case of social media, it matters in terms of where they spend their time.
Someone who is an up and coming executive who spends all their time focused on their career is not going to hang out on the same social media platforms as someone who lives in a conversion van and travels around the country, writing essays on wilderness areas and reviewing campgrounds.
You need to know who you’re talking to before you can figure out where to find them.
Know Your Ideal Customer
There is a difference between understanding your audience demographics and knowing your ideal customer.
Your audience demographics give you a broad picture of who your audience might be.
Your ideal customer is a specific picture of the person you want to buy from you on a regular basis.
You use the audience demographics to help you craft this picture of your ideal customer, also referred to as your customer avatar.
Fortunately, you can use social media to help you develop your customer avatar, thereby developing your social media audience.
I wrote a blog post about finding your perfect target audience last September. Check it out for reference and to download the Target Audience Questionnaire to help you home in on who you’re talking to.
Seek and You Shall Find Your Social Media Audience
Now that you know your customer demographics and have a clear picture of your ideal customer in your mind, it’s time to go find these people.
Your customer demographics can help narrow down the social media platforms you want to look at. People gravitate to the places they find others who have similar interests.
Business professionals tend to spend more time on LinkedIn. Teenagers go for Facebook and Twitter. Women in urban areas seem to like Instagram. Khoros put out this handy infographic on the demographics of each major social media platform. It’s worth a look to get a good start on where to find your audience.
Who Hangs Out on Which Social Media Platforms?
It is likely that your audience spends time on more than one platform. Knowing who spends time where can help you find your audience and do a better job of attracting them once you know where they are.
Please note, I am not a social media expert. This is a quick overview of the 3 most common platforms, not an in-depth lesson. There is a lot of information out there on how to effectively use these platforms to grow your audience.
The first place to look is obviously Facebook. The platform has more than 2 billion monthly active users at last count and is used by people in a wide range of demographics. You’re likely to find people who are interested in your products and services there, you just need to make sure you target them accurately.
If you’re running ads, Facebook makes it incredibly easy to target your audience with their internal systems. Facebook has a ton of information they use to help you show your ads to the “right” people so you’re getting the best return on investment (ROI) from your ads.
If you’re looking for organic traffic, you can attract people to your business page with posts and videos that interest them. This takes a lot longer than running ads, but it can be done.
Twitter tends more toward a younger audience. It also skews a bit more male than other platforms.
If you’re going to run ads, it doesn’t have as sophisticated a targeting system as Facebook does, but you can definitely target people based on where they live, their gender, keywords, their interests and the types of people they follow on Twitter.
To get your audience’s attention here, you have to follow them. Most of them will follow you back. You can find your audience using Twitter’s advanced search tool, which lets you search by location and what they’re tweeting about. Add these people to your list of people you follow and make sure you include them on a Twitter list so you can get exposure to them.
LinkedIn was originally known as the place to go to post your resume when you’re looking for a new job. It’s quickly becoming a social media force in its own right. Lots of people and businesses post articles, memes, etc. on LinkedIn’s feed as a way of attracting their audiences.
One of the great things about LinkedIn is that it allows you to connect directly with potential audience members through their messaging system and by connecting with people on their platform.
Using Groups to Find Your Social Media Audience
Each of these platforms offers groups (in Twitter’s case, lists) where people with common interests can contribute. It’s worth searching through these groups to find the ones that your ideal customers are a part of.
It can also be easier to connect with people in groups and attract them to your business than to hope they find you. If you do this, be respectful of the rules of the group and of the group moderator. Groups are someone else’s online “property.” Don’t be obnoxious or overt. If a weekly or monthly post allowing you to promote your business is offered, post stuff there.
But you can make direct connections and build relationships with potential audience members and contact them via the social media platform’s messaging system.
Survey Your Current Audience
If you have a current audience, such as a small following on a social media platform or an email list, ask them where they hang out online. Good questions include:
- What is your favorite social media site?
- Which blogs do you read regularly?
- Who do you follow on social media?
This can give you a wealth of information on where to find new audience members and how to attract them on their chosen social media platforms.
Also remember that on most social media platforms, you can upload your current email list and use that to attract current and “look alike” audiences (meaning people with similar demographics to your current audience.)
Create Content that Speaks to Your Social Media Audience
Now that you know where your social media audience hangs out, it’s time to create content that appeals to them.
I’ve talked about creating the perfect lead magnet before. This can help you build your email list.
Daily posts, sharing curated content, video, memes, inspirational quotes and blog post notifications are all great ways to get people to pay attention to, and follow you on social media.
You can keep all of this organized by using a content calendar, so you know what you’re posting where, when, and to whom.
Speaking of content, if you want to find out when I release new blog posts, and get my exclusive emails for subscribers only, please click on the button below to be added to my email list.
Now go forth and find your audience wherever they are on social media.