Why Depth is Greater Than Width in Your Audience Strategy

There is always a good feeling when you get new followers on your social media pages. After all, the higher the number of followers, the better the chances of reaching your target audience. However, if you are using the number of followers only as your key performance metric in your social media marketing, you may not get the accurate picture.

Having a solid base of engaged users is better than having a large number of followers who don't engage with your audience. This is particularly important in an era when social media platforms are limiting the reach of content and favoring accounts and pages that receive a higher engagement rate. This article explains why it is better to go deeper with your social media audience strategy rather than focusing on increasing the width (number of followers). 

Why Engagement Matters More Than Followers

When it comes to social media, quality is more important than quantity. Consider this: Would you rather have 200K followers who don't care about your product and don't bother to like, comment, or share your posts, or would you prefer to have 5K followers with a strong interest in your products and who are actively engaging with your content? The truth is that:

• If your followers don’t care about your business, its products or content, the followers are useless.
• The most important thing is the way those followers interact and respond to your content.
• Brands should focus more on the engagement rate than the follower count.

It's also worth noting that getting followers is usually the easier part. The challenging part is cultivating a community of engaged followers, which requires a significant amount of time and effort. However, once you focus on going deeper with your audience strategy, you will also become the go-to source for your audience.

What is the Social Media Engagement Rate?

Social media engagement is a metric that measures how your audience is interacting with your posts through likes, comments, clicks, and shares. Unlike many think, engagement isn't only about the number of likes, comments, and shares but also includes all the measurable actions social media users take to show their interest, love for the content, or brand loyalty. 

The engagement rate helps social media marketers and brands understand whether their social media marketing strategy is effective or if they should make adjustments. Through niching down and hyper-targeting, you can increase your engagement rate.

Benefits of Social Media Audience Analysis

One of the major steps in developing your audience strategy to increase engagement is social media audience analysis. This involves gathering data on your social media audience and analyzing it to gain a deeper understanding of the audience interested in your brand and how they interact with it. You can leverage the top AI tools for market research in your social media audience analysis.

There are several good reasons to consider social media audience analysis:

• Create personalized content. You cannot drive engagement unless you create content that resonates with your target audience.
• Higher engagement. You need to ensure that your campaigns and posts are tailored for a higher interaction level.
• Better targeting will increase your ROI. Ensure you are reaching the right audience with a message they are genuinely interested in.
• Better brand perception. You want to ensure that your brand image aligns with your audience's preferences and values.
• Data-driven decisions. Ensure that you are making informed choices on your social media strategy based on objective evidence.

Steps in Analyzing your Audience

To target the right audience, you will need a structured approach. Here are three key steps to follow:

Establish the Relevant Sources of Data

Unless you have the right data, your data analysis will not be right. This is why you need to centralize and organize your relevant data sets in one platform to ensure accuracy and consistency across the different platforms. 

Since different social media platforms are built on analytics, you can use them to get insight into your audience's behavior, engagement patterns, and content performance. You can also use third-party tools such as Sprinklr Social to collect data from all social media platforms and aggregate it in one dashboard.

Google Analytics can help you track the data of the social media platforms driving traffic to your site. You can check the data on the traffic source, the pages the traffic is landing on, and the period they remain on the site to enable you to optimize your social media marketing. You can do that with different steps, such as:

• The Acquisition tab displays the various social media platforms from which visitors are coming.
• The Source/Medium tab will help you track campaigns and traffic sources.
• User behavior analysis. Check metrics such as time on page, goal conversion, and bounce rate.
• Use these metrics to measure whether your social media campaign is effective.

Audience Data Analysis

You have already collected your audience data and aggregated it on one platform. Next, you will need to decode it so that it turns raw data into actionable insights concerning your audience's needs, preferences, and behaviors. These are all key nuances in a good social media strategy. It can provide you with valuable information as follows:

• Demographics. Ensure that you are analyzing your audience data based on age, location, language, gender, and other key demographic factors. You can use this information to determine your content strategy and enhance your targeting.
• Performance of your content. You can use the data to determine which of your content is performing well, which are the top-performing posts, and why they performed well. You can then use this data to create a good content strategy. 
• Engagement patterns. Understanding when your audience is online will help you determine the best posting time for maximum customer engagement and visibility.
• Audience behaviors and interests. You need to go deeper than demographics by also tracking addictive behaviors and patterns. Find out which topics they engage with more, the content format they like most, and how they interact on social media.

Analyzing Your Audience Behaviors

If you want to have an impactful audience strategy, you need to understand the factors that drive your audience’s actions. These can include the contextual environment, its characteristics, and the digital trends that contribute to their engagement. Some of the key factors to consider are: 

• The platform they prefer. Your social media audience isn't on every platform, as different platforms have different audiences. For instance, Instagram is popular among people seeking visual content, while LinkedIn appeals to professionals. Therefore, you want to ensure that your audience strategy is aligned with the platform on which they are predominantly present for maximum impact.
• Regional and cultural trends. The audience behavior is also predominantly affected by cultural and regional nuances. This is why you need to understand language, preferences, local festivals, and consumer behaviors in different regions. You can then use this information to tailor your campaign to the diverse preferences of your audience.
• Emerging digital trends. Ensure that you are also observing social media trends such as de-influencing short-form video, VR/AR integrations, and more. Since audiences change their behaviors according to social media trends, this can help you stay ahead of the competition.
• External factors. Additionally, various events, such as political developments, economic shifts, or global crises, can impact users' online activity and their priorities. You can then pivot your content strategy to show empathy and agility.

Final Thoughts

For a successful audience strategy, you need to go deeper rather than wider in your content strategy. One effective way to do that is with social media audience analysis. By following the steps outlined above, you can gain a deeper understanding of your target audience, increase engagement, and effectively achieve your social media goals.