Knowing your audience is a fundamental aspect of social media marketing for your business. A good social media strategy will use the business’s knowledge of their audience to determine the type of content they produce, what kind of promotional methods they use, when the best time to post is and where they should post.

Narrowing down your target audience can be done by asking questions such as:

• What age group does your product/service cater to?
• What is their average income?
• What are their common values?
• Where do they get their information?
• What type of content do they like?
• What are their interests?
• What is their geographical location?
• What challenges do they face?

You can answer these questions by undertaking comprehensive research that is current and accurate. Look into statistics, audience behaviour and past social media campaigns directed at your audience that have succeeded and failed.

Getting to know your social media audience doesn’t stop after you have identified demographics. It is helpful to continue trying to understand your audience after your campaign has gone live. Acknowledge areas you correctly predicted about your followers and continue or grow your social media strategy around them, but also understand where your campaign failed to please your audience. Learn from what your followers didn’t react to or gave negative feedback on and make changes to your campaign accordingly.

Identifying these positive and negative reactions can be done through using social media analytics with tools such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics or Brandwatch Consumer Research. These can tell you information such as engagement rates, follower increase and decrease, click-through rate, time of interaction and reach which can be used to track positive and negative reactions to different posts.

Another way to get familiar with your audience is by releasing a survey on social media. This can help you obtain quantitative and qualitative data using questions like:

• What social media site do you use the most?
• What kind of people do you follow on social media?
• What time of the day are you most likely to browse social media?
• What kind of content would you like to see more or less of?

It can also be useful to look at the type of audiences your competitors have, as they will be similar to yours. You can see the type of content different competitors are posting and see what is working well and not so well, based on engagement numbers and comments.