How to use social media to discover more about your audience

Discover more about Your audience
Social listening refers to analysing the conversations and trends happening not just around your brand, but around your industry, and using those insights to make better marketing decisions. Social listening helps you understand the conversations that happening not just when they are mentioning your brand or using your hashtag.
Social listening vs social monitoring
The differences between the two is that social listening highlights what the trends are and what’s going on that popular that’s relevant to your industry, these insights guide you to make better marketing decisions. Social monitoring involves tracking and responding to all the messages sent to or about your service or product.
Identify your ideal customer/buyer persona
What you can do for this is discuss with your team or yourself what your ideal customer /buyer persona is, this is a key segment to discovering more into your target audience, so you have a clear idea on who to aim for. You may have multiple buyer personas for different products, services, or areas of your business. There are several ways to perform buyer persona research, examine your existing contacts and clients and capture important information gather data from your sales teams for insights into your target customer and interview current customers/prospects to discover their likes and dislikes. After performing this research, you can then identify your buyer persona’s basic demographic information; this information will be key when conducting social listening on your target audience.
Look into your audience insights
Several social media platforms include built-in insights into your audience’s demographics and behaviour. you’ll need to look at your analytics on a platform-by-platform basis. Your audience is likely to differ platforms, so tailor your social media audience analysis to each platform for best results. This is important because by keeping track of your developing areas in your insights you can target your campaigns accordingly to build a stronger marketing strategy. Alongside your marketing databases, this information can be useful for location-focused small businesses such as cafes, restaurants, and hotels in rural areas. It allows you to recognise where most of your audience comes from.
Look at user’s content
It’s a good idea to delve deeper into the sort of content that dominate the profiles of your audience. If you seek out overlaps in the content your audience shares and engages with, you can tailor your marketing strategy accordingly. You may find that videos perform well in your industry because they’re engaging yet convey a lot of information in a short amount of time, or perhaps your target audience can’t get enough of the next best thing with Tiktok and Instagram Reels, with snappy short-form content that draws in a lot of attention., is easily shared around which creates a bigger market to target to. Remember that social marketing mainly involves creating content to share with your target audience. You can't make and share content that will be of interest to everybody. Therefore, you need to create the right material for your audience. To do this successfully, you first need to know precisely who makes up your audience.
Which Social Channels Will Your Target Audience Use?
We all know about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. These are all well-known social and video-sharing sites, with millions of members. And yet, not all people spend their time on these social channels. There are also many other smaller, less visible social networks, in some cases, highly specialized for specific types of audiences.
You can't possibly be active on all of them, and quite frankly, your target audience is unlikely to be either. Even firms that target the most socially active people won't have to target every social channel known to humanity.