The term big data is vague and worn-out.
I prefer to talk about audience intelligence.
We have more information about our customers, target audiences, and fans today than we could ever hope to comprehend.
It’s easy to get dumbfounded by the sheer volume of data out there and the variety of places it’s coming from.
However, with a little focus, knowing where to look, and what tools to use, these audience intelligence insights will rock your world.
Getting to know your social media audience better will change your business. It will increase your revenue, save you time, and improve your career.
My goal today is to make this activity easier for you and show you the clear benefits of monitoring relevant data about your social audience.
Where Should You Focus?
Twitter and Facebook have been busy updating and improving their analytics and insights, which is helpful for marketers. As two of the largest, most known, and well established social networks, they’re a great place to start.
There is also a myriad of tools out there to help you understand the audience you are reaching and how they talk about your brand.
Here are a few tips to get you started!
Decide What You Want To Know
Just digging into data on your Twitter audience can be interesting and informative, however, if you aren’t sure what you want to know, you might get lost in a rabbit hole.
There are countless ways to slice and dice the information to tell a different story. It is really helpful to you want to answer or hypothesis you want to test.
What you want to know will help to guide where you look for the data as well.
If you want to know more about the audience who already engages with your content on your social channels, the audience insights in Facebook and Twitter will be priceless.
Or if you want to know what your audience is saying about your most recent marketing campaign or about your new product, social listening will give you the answers to those questions.
Unsure where to start? Here are four initial questions/hypotheses you can investigate through audience insights and social listening:
- Who is most likely to engage with us on Facebook and Twitter?
- What was the response to our most recent marketing campaign?
- What are customers saying about our product on Facebook and Twitter?
- Which social channel is gaining the strongest response from our audience?
Dig Into Audience Insights Provided By Social Channel Analytics
The audience insights provided by social channels is great to understand the interests and demographics of your audience.
In Twitter’s analytics dashboard, you can now see information about:
- Your followers
- All Twitter users
- People who’ve engaged with your content
- Tailored audiences (people you manually select to track—such as your email subscribers, website visitors, or folks who have downloaded your mobile app)
You can even compare one audience to another to see the difference between all of your followers and the people who engage with your content, for example.
Twitter gives you the following audience information: occupation, marital status, household income, top interests, homeownership and buying style.
If you want to know what brand partnerships or event sponsorships make sense given your target audience, reviewing their top interests is a great starting point.
You’ll find much of the same type of information in Facebook’s audience insights as you can see in Twitter.
It is worthwhile to compare your Facebook audience demographics to your Twitter audience demographics as your audience on each channel may vary.
While Facebook’s People tab in your page Insights is helpful, I love the Audience Insights in the Business Manager. This tool helps marketers to learn more about their target audiences. Here you can dig into demographics, page likes, location, and Facebook activity of a given audience.
Pro Tip: Compare your page audience to all active users on Facebook. This is a great way to see where your audience over-indexes compared to Facebook as a whole.
Use Social Listening Tools To Answer Questions About Your Audience
Social listening is a wonderful way to answer questions you have about how people are talking about your brand, your products and even your competitors.
Many of the social listening tools will take a large number of social posts and visually show you trends and common themes. It’s a quick way to see a high-level view of what your audience is talking about.
We recently ran a campaign promoting Las Vegas on Facebook. Through social listening, I can see which properties were more popular with our audience.
I can take that information to build future campaigns specifically highlighting those properties. I can look at the exact posts about the Bellagio, for example, to see what users like most about that property.
When I research into the “Bellagio” topic deeper, it’s no surprise that the fountains are a big attraction. But what I didn’t know is that it’s a popular destination for wedding anniversaries.
Knowing that, I could create a campaign about spending your anniversary at the Bellagio.
These steps are only the tip of the iceberg of what you can learn about your audience, but it will help you to understand what resonates with your audience.
The better you understand your audience, the people talking about your brand and the people engaging with your content, the more effective you will be at reaching them and moving them to action.
Written by Karianne Stinson
Originally posted on socialfresh.com
