With 74% of people using social media to help them make purchase decisions, it’s one of the most valuable digital marketing tools available — and one that you can’t afford to pass up. Knowing this, you’ll want to take the time to create a killer social media campaign. You can develop a social media advertising strategy, set up some scheduled posts, and strategize how to interact with your audience.
Just one question remains: Who is your audience? If you’re not sure how to find your user base online — or even who that user base should be — don’t worry. We’re about to go over six steps for finding your target audience on social media.
Read on to learn more, and then consider partnering with WebFX — the digital marketing agency with over 25 years of experience — for even more social media help!
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1. Use your buyer personas
The first step to finding your target audience on social media is identifying your target audience. Hopefully, your business has created some buyer personas, or has access to demographic data about your customer base. If you don’t have either of those things, look for ways to create or acquire them.
You’ll want to have your customers in mind when looking for your audience. One of the best ways to figure out who you’re trying to sell to is to look at who you’ve already sold to. Pay special attention to quantifiable or categorizable features like:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Occupation
- Education level
2. Know the size of your audience
Another piece of information you’ll want for your social media audience analysis is the size of your audience. Are you marketing to a small and very specific niche group of people or are you targeting a broader audience?? The size of your audience will make a significant difference in how you run your marketing campaign.
For one thing, if you’re targeting a niche audience, you may not need as diverse of social media content because you’re appealing to the same type of people. For bigger audiences, though, you might need to target multiple types of people. In fact, if your audience is large enough, you’ll want to break it down into smaller niches that you can target more accurately.
3. Know which networks to use to find customers
Once you’re through identifying your target audience, you need to start figuring out where you can find them. You can find quite a few social media platforms, but your customer base probably won’t use every single one of them. The question, then, is this: Which social media platforms should you use and which ones are most valuable to your business?
If 90% of your customers use Pinterest, you’d want to start marketing there — If only 3% use it, it may not be worth your time. You can figure some of this out by looking up the demographics of each network and comparing them with your buyer personas to see which ones match up best. You can also send out surveys to your current customers asking them which social media networks they use.
4. Upload your email list
With the social media audience analysis complete, it’s time to start finding your audience on social media. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use an email list. If you don’t already have an email list, you may want to consider creating one.
It’s useful for far more than just finding social media audiences. You can get one started by putting email capture forms on your website for people to find when they view your content. Once you have an email list built up for your current customers, try uploading it to social media.
Most platforms will allow you to upload email lists as a way of finding people. They’ll attempt to locate the profile of each person on the list for you. Be aware that uploading an email list is usually part of the process of setting up paid ads, so you would have to invest in those to make this step work.
No platform will be able to find every single person on your list, of course. Some people don’t have social media, and others may have their accounts set to private. But if your list is large enough, you can still get a big start on your social media user base just from that.
5. Use social media ads
Another way to expand your social media audience is to invest in paid social media advertising. When you use social media ads, you can create custom audiences to target. Custom audience creation looks different on each platform.
On Twitter, for example, you can find groups of people based on what they’re tweeting or what hashtags they’re using. And on LinkedIn, you can look up a certain job title and get a list of people in that position. 
Facebook Ads Manager offers one of the best methods for creating custom audiences, however.
You can input the demographics from your buyer personas to generate a list of people that fit those criteria. Then you can even create “lookalike audiences” — audiences similar to your original custom audience — as a next step. Once you have these audiences laid out, you can begin targeting them with social media ads for your business.
6. Attract more users with engaging content
Once you have a base of social media users to start out with, you can start your actual marketing. Your follower count won’t initially be as high as you’d like, and that’s fine. That’s what the marketing is for!
Craft content that are specifically tailored to the users you already have. Make sure you’re giving them what they’re there for — interesting, helpful, engaging content that simultaneously promotes your brand. If the content is engaging enough, people will probably want to share it, which will inevitably attract more users with the same mindset and interests as the people already following you.
Eventually, your user base will grow organically as a natural result of your marketing content.
Get help with your social media marketing from WebFX
Now that you know how to reach people online, from identifying your target audience to finding them on social media, you can start targeting relevant leads. Once you have your social media audience, though, you still have to market to them — and that’s not always easy. Don’t worry — You don’t have to do it alone.
WebFX’s team of over 450 digital marketing experts have all the skill and dedication to drive your campaign to new heights with our social media services. To get started with a social media manager, just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!
