How To Conduct a Social Media Audience Analysis in 6 Steps

Building a presence on social media is a crucial marketing strategy. But how can business owners leverage their social media platforms to meet their goals? Since starting my own social media journey, I've been on a quest to find new and better ways to answer this question. 

In my experience, understanding your audience is a key part of building your following. By conducting a social media audience analysis, you can put out brand messaging that resonates with potential customers. I created this six-step guide to help you do just that. Here’s how I use a social media audience analysis to help me create content that engages my intended audience. 

What Is a Social Media Audience Analysis?

A social media audience analysis is an in-depth dive into your audience, analytics, and engagement across your social media platforms. This can help you better understand your audience's demographics, interests, and overall behaviors. By conducting this analysis, you can gain the information necessary to narrow your focus and make content that resonates with your audience. 

Doing a social media audience analysis allows you to reflect on your current strategies and clarify your goals so you can start building your social empire as a powerful thought leader in your industry. Need inspiration? Here are some things I explored in my last audience analysis:

• My goals as a content creator and how our social media presence could best be used to meet those goals
• My audience’s demographics and behaviors
• My social media analytics and engagement metrics, such as likes, followers, comments, shares, watch time, and more 
• My competitors’ social media strategies and how I could stand out
• My top social media posts and content that were already doing well
• The themes, topics, hashtags, and other subject matter of my social channels
• What platforms and formats were most successful for me
• My growth over time
• Changes I knew I could make

Why Is a Social Media Audience Analysis Crucial for Any Thought Leader?

To be honest, social media is highly saturated across all niches. With so much competition, simply making high-quality content isn’t enough. You need the right people to find it. This can only be done if you know who your content will resonate with and how to reach them. 

The only way to truly find your audience and make social content that reaches them is to get specific. If you've been creating content for a long time, a social media audience analysis will clarify who is already engaging with your content and give you key information about how to grow your ideal audience. If you're new to social media — like I was not too long ago — it will help you start strong by targeting the people you want to market to. 

I know how frustrating it can be when you make great content that doesn't do the numbers you were hoping for. Still, I try to keep a positive mindset by using failed content as an opportunity to learn more about what my audience enjoys. Making this small mindset change can help you improve your future content. Keep tailoring your online presence to improve your social selling strategy, increase your social media metrics, and build your ideal audience. 

Steps To Conduct Social Media Audience Analysis

Now that you understand the value of social media audience analysis, you might be wondering how to start. Here are six proven steps I recommend to conduct an effective one. 

Now that you understand the value of social media audience analysis, you might be wondering how to start. Here are six proven steps I recommend to conduct an effective one. 

1. Define Your Goals and Objectives

Be intentional about your social media goals. Do you want to drive traffic to your business, increase profit, or promote brand awareness? 

Make your goals SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Be sure to identify the actions you will take to achieve each goal. Identify the key performance indicators you'll monitor to track your progress and how you will increase your target audience’s engagement. 

2. Identify Your Target Audience

To create an effective social media strategy, you must know your target demographic. Even if you make high-quality content, you won’t see good engagement if it doesn’t reach the right people. Be specific when identifying your target audience. 

Note their age, sex, income level, potential occupation, cultural background, interests, and more. Create a specific avatar to market to. Then, solve that person’s problems with your content. Include CTAs in your content to help boost engagement.

Don’t forget to use best SEO practices. This will help your content appear in searches. Good SEO also helps put your content in front of viewers who enjoy similar content. This has made a huge difference for us.

3. Analyze Engagement Patterns

Social media analysis of engagement patterns will help you understand how your audience interacts with your content. Engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares, retweets, mentions, and click-through rates can tell you how effective your content was at engaging your audience’s attention in comparison to your other content. 

Identifying patterns in your content can help you determine which topics and formats do well with your audience (and which don't). You should also use social media reporting to track posting times and dates to determine when your audience is most active on social media. These small changes can help optimize your content strategy so you can focus on driving meaningful engagement and fostering a relationship with your audience.

4. Listen to Audience Conversations

Some of the most valuable feedback you can get on your social media platforms comes in the form of comments and messages. Listening to audience conversations on your platform can provide insight into your audience’s opinions and sentiments. 

Go beyond your platform and explore hashtags, mentions, comments, and discussions related to your business. By looking at different sources, you will get more honest information about how your audience perceives your business. Think about what challenges your community faces and what topics are important to them. 

Social monitoring tools can help research and track changes in your brand perception so you can keep on top of trends, both positive and negative. Listening to your audience and implementing their feedback can improve their perception of you and help you create a better overall product or service that will genuinely benefit them. 

5. Monitor Competitor Channels

Monitoring your competitors' social media strategies and audience engagement efforts can help you stand out. Your competitors have a similar target audience, and all the research you can do on your audience can help you improve your strategy. Try analyzing your competitors’ content, branding, content type, posting schedule, and engagement metrics to better understand what works with their audience and how they position themselves in the market. 

Identify gaps or areas where your competitors excel and use this information to refine your strategy. You can also identify what you're doing well that your competitors are missing out on. Monitoring competitors can help you set realistic goals and stay competitive. Exec Comms can help you do exactly this using the Benchmark tool, which shows you how you stack up against your competitors. 

6. Apply the Findings To Refine Your Strategy

Once you've gathered all the information from your social media audience analysis, find actionable insights and apply them to your content strategy. Refine your content to address the more specific needs and interests of your audience, and fill in any blanks you may have overlooked before. Experiment with different content formats, posting times, and engagement tactics to see what works with your audience. 

Keep supervising these changes and make note of what works and what doesn’t, adapting as you go. The only way to know if something works is to try it, so keep trying things and doing more of what works. 

Let Us Help You Reach Your Social Media Marketing Goals

At SocialHP, we believe that social media has the power to help executives grow their personal brand and foster authentic connections. Our ExecComms platform uses tools like Benchmark to help executives understand their audience, rise above their competition, and grow their overall social media influence. I hope your social media audience analysis gives you valuable insight and helps you grow your platform. 

Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know how your social media growth is going. I would love to be a part of your journey.