Permanent link for A guide to determining your social media audience on February 14, 2022

Knowing your audience is key to crafting successful social media. If you know who is following you and is interested in seeing what you’re sharing, you can tailor your posts platform-by-platform to reach the right people at the right time. 

Here’s a few tips for how to identify your social media audience.

Analyze Your Analytics

You don’t need a fancy analytics platform, such as Sprout, in order to get a decent idea of your audience. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all have decent internal analytics trackers that will give you an idea of which posts are most successful for you month-to-month. 

Take a look at your most successful and most unsuccessful posts you’ve made recently. What types of people engaged with it most? Was it current GVSU students? Possibly alumni? Or was it a broader audience of parents and community members?

Make note of what groups engage most with your posts platform by platform, then you can move on to the next step in understanding your audience.

We also recommend checking out this guide to identifying the best times of day to post, as this can better help you connect with your audience. 

Create Buyer Personas

Now it’s time to think deeper about the groups you just identified. Create a document outlining fictional versions of the people most likely to engage with you. This page provides a very helpful guide to creating buyer personas. 

The purpose of creating buyer personas is to have a more detailed picture of not only who is currently engaged with your social media, but also which less engaged groups you want to increase engagement with.

The process of creating a buyer persona document isn’t as tedious as it may sound, and it can be an eye-opening exercise! We recommend giving it a shot. 

Make a Plan

There are a variety of ways you can go about creating a plan to best engage all the different sections of your audience. 

You could consider color coding your content plan based on which buyer persona each post appeals to. Another option would be to center your content around a certain audience for each week or month, creating a theme to drive your content. 

All of this can seem like some unnecessary work, it’s just social media, right? Wrong! Doing this work can help you work smarter, not harder. Increasing engagement on your social media posts and fitting your content to your audience will translate to more successful social media overall. It always pays to have a plan.

As always, please contact us at [email protected] if you need any assistance. 

 

Categories: engagement strategy
Posted by Anna Young on Permanent link for A guide to determining your social media audience on February 14, 2022.