How to Find and Target Your Social Media Audience for Your Small Business

How to Find and Target Your Social Media Audience for Your Small Business

Social media marketing is a key part of most digital marketing strategies. For many small businesses, social media has become the biggest means of communicating with your audience. But finding that social media audience is another question entirely for your small business. In this article, I aim to identify some of the best tactics for identifying and targeting your audience on social media.

Finding the Right Audience

One important factor for social media audience building among small businesses involves knowing who to direct your content towards. This involves identifying where your audience exists and how to talk to them. Finding your audience means identifying your ideal customer. This first will involve building an ideal persona for your customer, including some of the following details:

1.  Demographics(age, location, education, etc.).
2. The needs of your customer.
3. Find what makes your customers unique.

Eclincher has an article about ideal audiences that might be helpful, but you can find this information by talking to your current audience and learning more from them.

What Social Media Platform Benefits Your Small Business Audience?

Once you know the ideal persona of your customer, you should be able to better find the customer as well. But finding where that audience resides and how to talk to them is equally as important different social media platforms have different advantages and disadvantages. Neil Patel’s blog gets into the deeper differences of each platform, but here are some quick pointers to identify.

• Facebook: Great for targeting as deeply and widely as possible
• Instagram: Has the highest engagement rate among social media apps but requires photo content
• Twitter: Best for little snippets and short content, it helps with communicating with a known audience.
• LinkedIn: Great for professional engagement and ads that deal with B2B transactions.

There are other apps as well that you might want to consider, but these are for of the biggest.

Expanding Your Audience Further

Once you know who fits into your small business’s audience, you can grow outwards from there via social media. This often involves using social monitoring and listening. If you’re aiming to reach your audience in the best means possible, you’ll likely want to know how to increase your engagement and reach. Sprout Social writer Brent Barnhart tackles some of these means of audience expansion in more detail.

In Conclusion…

When it comes to building an audience for your small business, here are three social media tips to know:

1. Identify the audience your small business needs on social media.
2. Use the right social media platforms that fit the needs for your small business, and where you can find their audiences.
3. Once you get the audience, expand your reach through engagement and social media usage.

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