Last week when I got on Facebook, I saw an ad at the side of my timeline for a wedding website. After I cried a little at the fact that I am so far away from planning a wedding, I thought to myself, “Wow – that company really hasn’t narrowed down their audience very well.”

 

If I were a wedding website trying to drive legitimate traffic to my site, I would set my ad reach up so that a single girl who has no social media mentions of a significant other wouldn’t really see my advertisement. Sure, there’s a possibility that I might be wedding obsessed (which is also not apparent on my social media accounts), click on it, and then share it with friends who are in the process of planning a wedding, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty slim.

 

I’m not suggesting that this website doesn’t know who their audience is, but what I am suggesting is that they didn’t properly articulate it into their social media strategy.

 

The great thing about social media ads is that you can narrow your audience down so much that you’ll actually get a suggestion to expand your audience filters in an effort to reach more people. I don’t recommend narrowing it down too much, but you should absolutely hit the main points.

Once you’ve got your main characteristics/interests/demographics of your target audience narrowed down, you should research everything you can about them. What are they buying? Where are they shopping? What books are they reading? What other common interests do they have? Where do they work? All of this information will help you make the best decisions when it comes to defining your social media audience. And better yet? You can find much of this out through analytics and data provided by social media platforms. You can learn how to target your ads on Facebook and on Twitter.

 

Defining an audience will not only help you target ad reach, pay-per-clicks, and timeline posts, it will also help you define a content strategy that keeps your audience engaged, leading to more relevant interaction with your brand.

 

I’d love to answer some questions about defining your social media audience. Leave them in the comments section or tweet me at @KadiMcDonaldOU.