The Complete Social Media Audience Analysis Guide

The Complete Guide to

on Social MediaAUDIENCE ANALYSIS

The Complete Guide to Competitive Analysis on Social

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Identify Your Audience 2

Audience Behavior 7

Brand-Directed Engagement 9

Align to Marketing Personas 13

Conclusion 15

The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 1

Introduction You conduct regular analysis of your own Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, but are you doing all you can to get to know your varied social audiences?

Before you set your social strategy, it’s essential to have a solid understanding of your brand’s unique audience segments. Who do you want to reach, build awareness with, support, or sell to—and are you reaching those people?

Inform your roadmap for the next week, quarter, and year by conducting an audience analysis that chops your social audience up into significant segments, which mirror traditional marketing personas and aid content creation.

This guide will walk you through best practices for learning about your different social audiences, what they’re attracted to, and, ultimately, what your brand could be doing better to win.


Identify Your Audience Chances are, you have many different audience segments within your social audience.

Let’s take a made-up doggy day care company named Pooch Pride. One of their audience segments could be thirty-something, college-educated women who live in cities, love Golden Retrievers, and use Facebook the most of all social networks, while another substantial audience segment could be a group of pre-teen boys who live in the suburbs, love pitbulls, and interact the most on Twitter.

How can you identify your own brand’s different audience segments using data points to define them, and target social content accordingly? How can you take social data and make it psychographic and demographic data?

Not all social networks are created equal in terms of the data they offer about your social audience. On Twitter, however, you have access to a very rich source of information: keywords present in audience profiles.


Twitter Profile Keyword AnalysisReviewing the keywords found in your audience’s Twitter profiles requires you to do some hands-on analysis in Excel. Analysis of this nature doesn’t have to be too time-consuming, and can enrich your understanding of your brand on social in a number of ways.

You might find that the terms your followers use to describe themselves in their audience profiles are totally out of line with who you thought your audience was, or who you want your audience to be. On the other hand, you might find out that you’re right on target, and get some additional insights about your followers.

It’s important to review this keyword data on a regular basis, as your follower group on social is always evolving, depending on which campaigns you’re running and strategies you’re employing.

How people choose to define themselves on their profiles can tell you a great deal about what their core interests, skills, and even demographics are. You can use this data to find out about your social audience’s interests, roles, geographic info, gender, industries, jobs, and educational affiliations.

This chart from Simply Measured’s Twitter Audience Analysis shows the keywords most frequently used in one brands’ followers’ profiles. When you download this report into Excel, you can input any keywords you want into the chart to see how frequently they were used and how they compare.


Interests By searching for interests related to your business within the profiles of your followers, you’ll get a good overview of how your followers relate to different parts of your business. You’ll also find overlapping interests, which can help you formulate future content that surprises but still attracts your social audience. For instance, if you are a yoga clothing retailer and search for “yoga” within your follower profiles, you may find the term “Ayurvedic medicine” is often used in profiles which list “yoga” as an interest. You could do some research here, and find ways to partner with an Ayurvedic medicine company for social content, or create content on your own that somehow relates to this topic.

Roles Take the role “mom,” as depicted in the our example “Audience Keyword Analysis” chart. Finding out how many of your followers put this role in their profiles will tell you a lot about what kind of content they’d like to see.

Gender One way to figure out the gender mix of your audience is to search for common male and female names, or you can do a search for words like “lady” or “guy.”


Geographic Info Search for different geographical locations where you know your brand is strong, then search for geographical locations where you know awareness of your brand is not high. Compare the two to find out how much progress you have to make in your lower-awareness areas. Geographical info (along with gender info) is available on Facebook, as well.

Industries By searching for “Works at” and “Work at” within the profiles of your followers, you can compile a list of the different companies your followers work at and begin to break down your audience segments by industry.

Jobs By searching for specific job title terms like “Lawyer” or “Community Manager,” you can compile a list of the different jobs your followers have and break down your audience segments by job type.

Analyzing your competitors’ social profiles can show you the minute ways in which your followers and theirs differ or relate. Looking at this metric for competitors often yields surprising and intriguing results.

Stay Competitive Tip #1


Universities Often, Twitter users will include their university or graduate school affiliations in their profiles. By searching for either specific universities or the terms “University” and “College,” you can find out a lot about the education level and alumni ties of your followers.

Now is when you create your lists of audience segments based on the characteristics most important to your brand, such as gender or interest in a particular activity. Then it’s time to move to the next step: finding out how these audience segments tend to behave.

It’s not enough to carry out a top-level analysis—you have to get into the weeds,

too. For instance, say you are looking for women who identify themselves as “wife” in their profiles because your product tends to be a hit among married women. You can’t just take the results of our example “Audience Keyword Analysis” chart at face value, that 2,233 of your followers are married. It’s worth giving the profile text a look, too. This is for two reasons.

One, you may be getting misinformation. When you look at the actual profile text for “wife” mentions, some profiles may say “Huge Wife Swap fan” or “Not ready to be a wife, just living my life,” which means they don’t fit into your target audience segment.

Another advantage to going a little deeper in your analysis is finding common words that signify the Twitter user is a wife, such as “married” or “marry.”

Pro Tip: Dig In


Audience BehaviorOnce you know your audience segments, you’ll want to know how each segment behaves—especially in relationship to your brand. How often is each of your audience segments interacting with you?

Your Active, Popular Followers Which of your audience segments tend to be high-frequency social users? Which are occasional dabblers? Which have significant social audiences of their own—and thus reach you can capitalize on?

You want to determine which audience segments are active, generally speaking.

By looking at a metric like audience distribution by “Date of Last Tweet,” you discover just how active your followers are. Dive deeper into the data, and you’ll find out exactly which kind of active followers you’re attracting so that you can target content towards those people moving forward.

This chart from Simply Measured’s Twitter Audience Analysis shows one brand’s audience distribution by date of last Tweet.

Learning about your competitors’ active followers shows you how much overlap there is between your follower bases, and if they’re tapping into an active social base you’re not, so you can replicate their tactics moving forward.



Finding your most influential followers—those who have the most followers and reach themselves—is a good place to find social users to partner with to hit one of your chosen audience segments, or many of them. You can look at their Klout scores or simply get a sense of their audience size on the networks where you want to grow your reach.

This list from Simply Measured’s Twitter Audience Analysis shows one brand’s most influential followers over a given time period, sorted by the number of followers those followers have. This list can also be sorted by how many people these influential followers are following, their followed-to-following ratio, number of Tweets sent, Klout score, and more.

Learning about your competitors’ influential followers shows you how much overlap there is between yours and theirs, if they’re creating content and partnerships that attract big social players, and how you can do the same.


COMPETITORS’ MOST ACTIVE FOLLOWERS

YOUR MOST

ACTIVE FOLLOWERS

TARGET AUDIENCE


Brand-Directed Engagement Mentions It’s time to find out which audience segments are specifically mentioning you, and how they’re doing so.

Dig into the mentions of your brand and find out which follower audience segments are interacting with you most.

This information will also enable you to identify and subsequently target social users who are mentioning you but aren’t following you, yet.

This list from the Simply Measured Twitter Account Report shows one brand’s mentions over a given time period with username, name, Tweet content, link to the Tweet, and more included.


Engagement as % of AudienceBy finding out your engagement as a percent of audience across all your active social channels and your competitors’ too, you can see how you’re getting social users to engage with you. This metric helps you answer the following questions:

• Are you engaging the majority or a small percentage of very engaged users?

• Are your competitors growing their number of total followers but not increasing their percentage of engaged followers?

• Is your engaged audience new or have they been with you for a long time?

Your audience may change as your brand changes. You may find that, as your brand grows on social, you need to market to a different persona or an additional persona.

This chart from Simply Measured’s Cross Channel Social Performance report shows how one brand’s engagement as a percent of audience compares across Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Tumblr. It’s the place where you can understand your ability to connect with your audience segments on specific social channels within context of one another.


Negative Engagement Everyone has negative engagement as well as positive engagement.

Use negative engagement to set a baseline, look for peaks, and make improvements in the same way you would look at peaks in positive engagement to continue a trend.

Don’t let a huge follower drop be a nasty surprise on Monday morning.

Conduct ongoing audience analysis by keeping an eye on how your audience is reacting negatively to content. You can keep a running list of things that don’t work and use that list to plan differently moving forward.

This chart from Simply Measured’s Facebook Page Insights report shows one brand’s negative feedback stats over time.


Keyword Analysis on Posts What exactly are people saying about you or to you? Run a keyword analysis around your designated hashtags or brand name to find out.

This data will tell you how much your audience is engaging with you, help you link spikes in mentions with specific social content, and even allow you to drill down into and peruse the posts that mention your brand and its hashtag properties.

This chart from Simply Measured’s Cross-Channel Social Performance report shows one brand’s keyword activity on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, forums, videos, and Google+.


Align to Marketing Personas How do your social audience segments align with your marketing personas (semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers)?

Data about your social audience segments is of no use if you can’t understand it in context with your broader marketing framework.

Bulk Up Your Marketing Personas You may already have marketing personas but your social research will give you invaluable additional information for those personas.

A frequent problem with marketing personas is that they’re largely built on guesses, aspirations not reality, or expensive market research.

Josie Brine Account Manager, Data Data Data USA

Demographics

• Age 24 - 30 • Female • $100 - 200K • Seattle, WA • BA in Finance • Married

Goals & Challenges To lead her department someday. To own a house. Struggles to maintain balance between home and work life.

Values & Fears Values family and maintaining a high income. Fears not having enough money for retirement and not spending enough time with her family and pooch.

Elevator Pitch Are you looking for affordable but luxurious daily care for your small, medium, or large dog? Look no further.

Marketing Message You have one less thing to worry about now: let us take good care of your pooch.


Social is a great solution for this problem. If you use it and analyze it properly, you can get an unprecedented amount of accurate data on your customers and prospective customers at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research.

For example, if you conduct analysis on your followers’ bios or research your recent top engagers and find that your follower base aligns well with your target personas, you have good validation for your tactics. If the opposite is true, you get a wake-up call and can strategize about how to get the followers you want as opposed to the followers you have.

Who Are You Missing?

After you’ve done the hard work of finding out who is following you (and your competitors), who is engaging with you, and how they’re doing so, you might be faced with a troublesome vacuum where an important target customer or persona should be.

This is actually a good problem to have. Chances are, this persona is quite specific, and you are successfully hitting other target audience segments. Now you can begin crafting content and planning strategies to draw in your missing audience.

Is there a large part of your social audience that you can’t tie to an audience segment? You want to reduce the size of that group because, while followers are nice to have, you want to have an audience that is ready to help your business goals.


ConclusionThe goal of conducting a solid social audience analysis is to get rich information on your social audience and share it with your marketing team regularly. This data opens new avenues for social content creation and marketing strategies.

How different is your current social user from the marketing personas you’re targeting? How does this challenge your assumptions? How can you grow and nurture a smaller social audience segment or one you that was invisible to you until now?

By identifying your audience, taking a magnifying class to the different behaviors within your audience segments, and aligning your social audiences to your marketing personas, you’ll have a real leg up on the competition and a much deeper knowledge of your own brand.

Lucy Hitz is a Social Media Content Writer at Simply Measured, where she works on longform content and writes for the award-winning social analytics blog. Her favorite musical artist is Taylor Swift, and you can find her on Twitter at @LLHitz.

Social Analytics Framework How Audience Analysis Fits In

Our social analytics framework below highlights the essential components of the process that enables marketers to plan and measure their social programs. Audience analysis fits into the planning process, allowing marketers to understand their opportunities and challenges as they set strategy.

About Simply Measured Simply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution, empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social data to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize their tactics for maximum impact.

Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of business users. We think reporting should be simple, attractive, and accessible for everyone – not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips, providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and allowing you to generate beautiful solutions on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with a couple of clicks.

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