How do I target the right social media demographic?

If there’s a particular type of person you want to reach, social media can be a great tool – but use that power wisely,

How to reach a particular type of person.

“Interests are usually far more relevant, but there are times where traditional demographics still play their part”

Demographics change quite quickly on social platforms,” said Alison Battisby, founder and managing director of Avocado Social ( avocadosocial.com). “Instagram was always the ‘young people’s platform’, but a lot of the business owners I’m training are targeting audiences of 35+ on there. It’s going to go the same way as Facebook and become a mass-market network that every age group has some connection to.”

As audiences change, and the typical user makeup of each social network morphs over time, how do you know what your demographic is, and who you should be targeting? For Katy Howell, CEO of Immediate Future ( immediatefuture.co.uk), it all starts with insights, which she uses to research the challenges facing particular industries.

“We look at those and then unpick the personas that sit behind them. At higher levels in the IT and tech industry, for instance, the audience is predominantly male.”

This immediately makes one of the key demographics – gender – almost irrelevant in tech, allowing you to focus your attention on more granular segmentation elsewhere.

“What I’m really interested in is insights like the fact [IT senior execs] tend to follow news organisations, bloggers, journalists and politicians,” Howell said. “Nuggets like this tell us when they’re likely to be online, what their preferred social media channel is, and what their behaviours are, like whether they’re going to be on late at night or all day.”

Defining your audience

Each of our interviewees agreed that, in many markets, interests are far more relevant than age, sex and location, but there are times where traditional demographics still play their part. Kate Rose, client director of Rose McGrory ( rosemcgrory.co.uk), says the traditional approach to demographics works when marketing an event for a specific geographical area. Likewise, there are times a brand might rely on such metrics to survive in the face of a declining audience.

She cites a caravanning magazine that “has watched its userbase grow older with it… they’re now coming up to 70 and either don’t want or aren’t capable of going camping any more. So the magazine used social media to sell the idea of the freedom around camping and caravanning to a younger demographic. Some [of them grew up] thinking caravanning was a bit nerdy, but now they’re increasingly associating it with road trips and freedom.”

The magazine married established interests and lifestyle with traditional demographics to reposition itself and give the whole idea of camping and caravanning a makeover.

“[The magazine] didn’t want to make any decisions about who they would appeal to,” said Rose. “They just wanted to target people in their twenties and thirties who might have

young families and not want to do long-haul.”

Such broad strokes won’t work for everyone, and Battisby says it’s not always the best approach for brands – especially those that believe social media can quickly deliver a national or even global audience. “I was working for a drinks company and I asked it who its target audience was. They said ‘everyone in the UK,’ but after talking to them a little bit further I saw it wasn’t going to appeal to 16-year-olds, but house-conscious 35-year-old pilates goers who shop at Waitrose, have two kids and live in a detached house in the home counties.”

The lesson, she says, is that while social media can be extremely effective, it still pays to know your target audience inside out. Take chief technology officers. Almost all CTOs visit or use a social network, and a third follow brands they plan to buy from, says Howell. No surprise there. Of greater relevance is how they behave online, and how that should inform a social marketer’s posts.

“They don’t comment a lot,” she said, “but they do like to retweet – predominantly news – and the hottest topics are AI, machine learning and deep learning.”

When writing calls to action, then, Howell fits the phraseology to the audience. “Once you know senior IT people retweet rather than comment, you can change your copy to say, effectively, ‘share this’ rather than asking ‘what do you think?’”

Tailoring your content

“You really do need to start thinking about behaviours, interests, hobbies, what people might have clicked on or what their online shopping behaviours might be,” said Battisby, and Rose agrees. “The people who know the business best are the business owners,” she said. “It’s their responsibility to know their USPs, who they should be selling to and why. If they want to target a new audience and have a rationale behind that, that’s fine, but really social media needs to be a tool that helps them achieve what they’ve already logically decided they need to do. They shouldn’t spontaneously decide they want to sell gardening tools to 21-year-olds on Instagram.”

For Howell, it comes down to targeting “sleepless nights” – the topics that are keeping her clients’ customers awake – and making the content speak to a particular type of reader. “What’s relevant to someone who’s interested in transport will be very different to what’s relevant for someone who’s interested in public sector,” she pointed out. “They have different angles, issues and problems [which the content needs to reflect].”

With new content appearing by the second, social marketers have never faced as much competition but, even with a professional audience, many of the tools used by back-room bloggers remain effective. “Think creatively about ways to tell your story,” said Battisby. “Videos, GIFs, moving images, emoji – anything to make your content pop in the newsfeed is very important.”

And, if talk of emoji has set alarm bells ringing, she’s quick to point out that “graphs and arrows are nice ways of breaking up content. In terms of GIFs, I’ve worked with financial brands to bring infographics to life with animation. It’s subtle, but it grabs people as they’re scrolling quickly through Twitter or LinkedIn.”

Howell takes a similar approach, using “GIFs, images, copy, white papers and so on, some of which will drive to a website. The second part of targeting on social media is

“Always make sure you understand your audience, you’ve thought through who you want to target, and you know where they hang out”

retargeting. If someone visits your site and shows interest in a landing page that talks about AI, you may retarget them with more AI information that leads them down the funnel and helps them make purchase decisions.”

“Always make sure you understand your audience, you’ve thought through who you want to target, and you know where they hang out,” said Rose, bringing us back to the ways audiences differ between platforms. “You can have really good penetration in terms of registration, but it doesn’t necessarily mean people are using [a particular social network]. Everyone will say they have B2B work to do and need to reach professionals, while all the stats say that 95% of professionals in a particular age bracket use LinkedIn. That is true in the sense that they’re registered with it, but it doesn’t mean they’re going onto it every day.”

Use the resources at your disposal

“A lot of the time businesses get things wrong on social media because they haven’t delved much into the insights,” said Battisby. “There are some wonderful tools for analysing who your followers are, what their professions and interests are, how senior or junior they are and so on. Using this data can quickly answer a question or settle a confusion.”

But, says Rose, be prepared to invest – not just in terms of content, but financially too. “Since all of the algorithms have come into play on every social media site, the vast majority of businesses have to be prepared to engage with paid networking. The days when you could just create great content, put it out there and reach people are over.”