Why are certain businesses successful on social media, whereas others seem to flounder in a void? The key is understanding who’s behind the screen.

Social media audience analysis is more than just a catchphrase. It’s the core of any B2B business’s effective social media marketing strategy. Imagine knowing precisely what your target audience is looking for, where they are on the internet, and what they would like to know about your business. This is powerful knowledge for every business. 

How do you achieve this? How can you transform information into a marketing strategy that is a means of reaching and engaging your intended clients?

No matter if you’re just beginning or are looking to improve your method, this blog will take you through the fundamentals of audience analysis on social media. 

What is Social Media Audience Analysis?

Social media audience analysis is a strategy used to analyse the traits, preferences, habits, and behaviour of your target audience using social networks.

It is the process of collecting and analysing information about people who you engage with your business online. This is vital in adjusting your marketing strategy to suit your clients’ needs and preferences. Why is this important for a B2B business marketing plan? 

Knowing your target audience inside and out will transform your social media campaigns with a resonant, targeted approach.

It’s about making each post, each campaign, and every interaction memorable and results-driven by ensuring they are aligned with what your audience is interested in.

At its base, the concept of social media audience analysis helps answer crucial questions like: 

• Where are most of your followers? 
• What are they interested in?
•  When do they visit the business page?

If you can answer these questions, you can build content that’s not only noticed but valued.

It’s not just about growing shares or likes; it’s about creating authentic connections that build business loyalty and encourage conversions.

The Importance of Social Media Marketing Analytics

Why is social media audience analysis necessary in the first place?

Can you judge if your social profile is in good shape from the number of comments and likes? No. It’s more than looking at how your followers respond to your posts. You need to look deeper, to find out the extent to which your social networks generate leads for your business.

This is where your social media marketing analysis can be of huge benefit. If you look at your social media accounts, you will see indicators such as:

• New followers
• Unfollows
• Post engagements
• Reach
• Mentions

This data type can help you better understand how your followers interact on your social media platforms like LinkedIn. You can adjust your strategy accordingly.

After a couple of months of putting together your B2B business social media audience analysis reports, you’ll have a good idea of what your clients are talking about, who your clients are, and so on. 

So, what’s the significance of social media audience analysis?

 It provides you with the following:

• What kind of content your target audience is engaged with
• Demographics of your audience
• What social networks (LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Facebook etc.) your intended audience is using
• And much more

This data is valuable for the success of your online B2B business.

Why Should You Know Your Target Audience?

Here are some benefits of knowing the target audience for your business:

Save Money by Talking to the Right People

You wouldn’t run LinkedIn ads across the whole of the UK for your B2B business if you were trying to target only one city.

The art of knowing your target audience is just like that. You’ll save money since you’re running ads aimed only at those most likely to be interested.

The ability to narrow your social media group allows you to focus on those users who wish to pay attention, not those who scroll and go.

Increase Conversion Rates Through Personalisation

If you know your intended audience well, you can modify your messages or offers and the user experience to suit your audience’s preferences.

This degree of personalisation helps your clients feel appreciated, motivating people to take action – whether that’s signing up for the newsletter, buying a service or becoming a loyal client.

How To Identify Your Social Media Target Audience

Identifying your audience for social media audience analysis is similar to setting up your sat nav before heading off in the car. It will ensure that your marketing efforts for B2B business are going in the right direction.

Here are some steps to find your audience:

Demographic Factors

Demographics are the foundation of social media audience analysis. They provide the clearest image of your target audience at a fundamental scale.

• Age: Understanding the age range of your target audience will help you create a message that resonates with their life stage.
• Location:  Where your target audiences are based will affect your social media strategy.
• Income Levels: It affects the purchasing power of clients and could influence your marketing strategies to meet the budget of your target audience.
• Work: Knowing the work your target audience does for a living will provide insights into what solutions and offers they are looking for. 

The collection of demographic data helps in creating a picture of your target market, allowing you to know how to direct your marketing campaigns for B2B business.

Psychographic Factors

While demographics determine your target audience, psychographic indicators indicate why they may be attracted to your business or service.

They include:

• Personality Characteristics: Are your prospective clients adventurous? Or do they prefer routine and stability?
• Lifestyle: How do they spend their spare time? What are their interests and hobbies?
• Habits: Examine their buying behaviour and interactions with businesses on the internet.
• Beliefs and Values: Knowing what your clients value will help you align your business message with their values and beliefs.

Combining psychographic and demographic factors will give you an overall picture of your present and future followers.

This dual strategy ensures that your marketing strategy and social media posts are created for maximum engagement, speaking directly to clients behaviour and understanding your particular audience.

Where Do You Find Your Audience?

It’s crucial to understand which areas your target audience is located in to boost your presence on social media within those spaces. Here are a few ways to achieve this:

Web Analytics

The most effective way to find a target audience is web analytics. One of the most valuable features that Google Analytics has is the ability to monitor where your site’s visitors come from, be it through organic search results as well as paid advertisements or, more importantly, posts on social media. 

If you can determine the social network that is giving you the highest number of visitors, you can find where most of your followers are spending their time. You can also employ strategies to draw in audiences from different social media sites.

Target Demographics

Knowing how your demographics for social media audience analysis affect the clients is crucial. It’s about knowing who’s the most inclined to purchase your services.

Here’s how you can make use of this aspect:

• Research Tools: Utilising research tools for simple surveys and more in-depth marketplace research tools, there are many methods to collect demographic data about your client base.
• Detailed Profile: Combining demographic information with insights from web analytics and social listening will give you a complete picture of your ideal audience.
• Comparing Your Audience With Competitors: Understanding your competitors’ audiences will help you identify areas in which you stand out and draw the attention of clients with similar demographics.

Focusing on the demographics of your target audience ensures that your marketing strategy is resonant with the right audience, increasing your social media profile and overall engagement.

In integrating social listening with web analytics and targeted demographic research, you’re not guessing about who your target audience is any more.

Social Listening

Finding your followers on social media is accomplished with a method known as “social listening.” It’s typically used to find problems among targeted audiences.

Social listening lets you monitor conversations with your potential and current online followers. Determining where conversations are taking place on the internet and where your “community” spends most of the time lets you participate in the discussion and interact with the clients.

How To Perform a Social Media Analysis

Conducting a social media audience analysis certainly sounds complicated, but it is vital in finding and understanding those who are most interested in your business.

This is a simple step-by-step guide that will help you to do social media audience analysis:

Set Clear Objectives

Begin by asking, “What do I hope to accomplish by conducting this research?” Your goals can include increasing engagement, understanding your audience’s demographics, and determining content preferences.

A clear goal will define your thinking and help ensure you get the right data.

Identify Your Audience

Who do you want to connect with? This is the first step in defining your ideal client base. Think about factors like locations, age, preferences and habits. Tools such as Facebook Insights, LinkedIn analytics, Twitter analytics, and Google Analytics can add valuable information to help you visualise your current target audience.

Use Social Listening Tools

Social listening tools permit you to keep track of conversations regarding your company, business and competitors on different social platforms.

This process helps you understand what your audience is interested in, their issues, and what content they consume.

Analyse Engagement on Your Posts

Review your previous posts on your social accounts like LinkedIn. Which ones garnered the most comments, likes and shares? Examining the effectiveness of your content will reveal which subjects and formats resonate the most with your audience. This information is essential for creating future content that is relevant and engaging.

Conduct Social Media Competitor Analysis

A competitive social media analysis is essential for a thriving business. Take a closer look at the social media strategies of your competitors and ask these questions:

• What kind of people are your competitors focused on?
• What are they doing to reach their intended audience?
• What are they doing wrong?
• What’s missing from their plan?
• What are the primary benefits that they are advertising?
• How often do they post?
• Which content formats are performing the best for them? 
• What tone do they have?

When you are aware of what your competitors are doing, then you’ll be able to adapt your output, to take advantage of the information.

Collect Feedback Directly

A great way to find out more about your clients is to ask them questions. Carry out surveys, polls, or post questions directly through your social media platforms to solicit feedback about your business, material, and what they’d want to see more of.

Review and Adjust Regularly

The preferences of your audience and social media trends can shift quickly. It is a good idea to check your data about your followers and alter your strategy on a regular basis. This ensures that your social media campaigns are relevant and engaging throughout the years.

Best Practices To Create Social Media Content for Your Target Audience

Once you’ve learned how to do social media audience analysis, you can then use that to explore ways to increase your audience’s engagement. You can accomplish this by serving the right content at the most appropriate time. Here are a few suggestions to help you achieve success:

Publish Content for Various Stages of the Marketing Funnel

Your audience doesn’t exist as one homogenous group. They’re all at different stages of business recognition and engagement. Do not try to create content that is for everyone and everywhere. Instead, focus on creating content that resonates with your targeted segment of the audience.

This means having a mixture of:

• Educational posts for beginners
• Thorough how-to guides for people who are considering your business
• Testimonials from clients for those who are on the cusp of buying.

Find the perfect balance and keep your social media pages manageable with one kind of content or the other.

A/B Test Different Content Elements

There needs to be a definitive guideline for what works with social media (and what does not). The perfect option is to try out different approaches.

Here are some different things you can trial:

• Time of publishing  – are your posts getting the most traffic in the mornings, or do they perform better in the evenings?
• The format of content – do infographics receive higher shares among your existing users than your videos?
• Calls To Action –  is “Learn More” more efficient than “Buy Now”?
• Post length – do short and snappy posts attract more attention, or would your ideal readers prefer more thorough content?
• Hashtags – do posts that use hashtags perform better? And if yes, which hashtags work best?
• Images are a crucial element – does using images result in higher engagement than text-only posts?

Leverage User-Generated Content

Engaging your existing clients in social marketing helps your posts be more relevant and increases your connection with your users. Your intended audience will feel respected and valued.

User-generated material is difficult to get but worth aiming for as it really stands out. You can incentivise your clients to share their success stories on your social media to help build your credibility and reputation.

Content Strategy Development

The process of creating content that is a hit with your target audience begins by understanding their needs as well as their challenges and their preferences. Utilise the information gained from social media audience analysis to develop content that directly addresses them.

This could include:

• Customise Your Message: Adjust your style, tone and content to reflect the information your intended audience is looking for. If your target audience is on the hunt for informative, detail-oriented posts, make sure you’re providing it. 
• Focus on Your Clients’ Needs: Highlight solutions to the problems your clients are dealing with.
• Play Around with Formats: Based on your social media audience analysis you may find that your clients prefer images over posts with text or infographics over images. Mix and match your material styles to keep your online presence exciting and fresh.

Remember, the objective is to create a content approach that draws attention and stimulates interactions, creating a deeper relationship with the potential audience.

Platform Selection

All social media platforms offer different benefits, but you need to know where your potential clients are spending their time.

The proper platform selection is vital to optimise your marketing efforts.

• Find Your Audience Where They Are: If your targeted audience study suggests that your ideal clients spend time browsing LinkedIn instead of X (Twitter), concentrate on that platform. It’s about being visible in the places where your clients are.
• Keep a Close Eye on the New Audience Segments: Audience analysis isn’t a single task. You have to keep checking for changes in your audiences’ preferences on platforms and be willing to explore new platforms that can reach new clients or interact with existing audiences in more effective ways.

Focusing on the right social media platforms will ensure that the right people see the content and that every post counts.

This method of planning, backed by an extensive social media audience analysis, can dramatically boost your social media profile and influence.

Summary

Knowing who your clients are is the most critical aspect of every successful B2B business marketing strategy, particularly in the highly competitive world of social networks.

The process of using social media audience analysis to find your ideal clients enables you to tweak your content strategies for optimum marketing. 

Next Steps

By creating posts on social media that resonate with certain groups, you’ll be able to make your mark and create new business opportunities on social networks.

For a busy business owner, developing and executing a successful social media strategy can be very time consuming.

100 Pound Social can help you here. We have the knowledge and expertise to provide cost-effective, top-quality social media content and lead generation for all your marketing needs. 

Join a 15-min demo to find out how we can help you create the best social media content for your business.