The Complete Social Media Audience Analysis Guide

1. The Complete Guide to
on Social Media
AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

2. The Complete Guide to Competitive Analysis on Social
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Identify Your Audience 2
Audience Behavior 7
Brand-Directed Engagement 9
Align to Marketing Personas 13
Conclusion 15

3. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 1
Introduction
You conduct regular analysis of your own Facebook, Instagram,
and Twitter accounts, but are you doing all you can to get to
know your varied social audiences?
Before you set your social strategy, it’s essential to have a solid
understanding of your brand’s unique audience segments. Who
do you want to reach, build awareness with, support, or sell
to—and are you reaching those people?
Inform your roadmap for the next week, quarter, and year
by conducting an audience analysis that chops your social
audience up into significant segments, which mirror traditional
marketing personas and aid content creation.
This guide will walk you through best practices for learning
about your different social audiences, what they’re attracted to,
and, ultimately, what your brand could be doing better to win.

4. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 2
Identify Your Audience
Chances are, you have many different audience segments
within your social audience.
Let’s take a made-up doggy day care company named Pooch
Pride. One of their audience segments could be thirty-
something, college-educated women who live in cities, love
Golden Retrievers, and use Facebook the most of all social
networks, while another substantial audience segment could be
a group of pre-teen boys who live in the suburbs, love pitbulls,
and interact the most on Twitter.
How can you identify your own brand’s different audience
segments using data points to define them, and target social
content accordingly? How can you take social data and make it
psychographic and demographic data?
Not all social networks are created equal in terms of the data
they offer about your social audience. On Twitter, however,
you have access to a very rich source of information: keywords
present in audience profiles.

5. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 3
Twitter Profile Keyword Analysis
Reviewing the keywords found in your audience’s Twitter
profiles requires you to do some hands-on analysis in
Excel. Analysis of this nature doesn’t have to be too time-
consuming, and can enrich your understanding of your brand
on social in a number of ways.
You might find that the terms your followers use to describe
themselves in their audience profiles are totally out of line
with who you thought your audience was, or who you want
your audience to be. On the other hand, you might find out
that you’re right on target, and get some additional insights
about your followers.
It’s important to review this keyword data on a regular
basis, as your follower group on social is always evolving,
depending on which campaigns you’re running and strategies
you’re employing.
How people choose to define themselves on their profiles can
tell you a great deal about what their core interests, skills, and
even demographics are. You can use this data to find out about
your social audience’s interests, roles, geographic info, gender,
industries, jobs, and educational affiliations.
This chart from Simply Measured’s Twitter Audience Analysis
shows the keywords most frequently used in one brands’ followers’
profiles. When you download this report into Excel, you can input
any keywords you want into the chart to see how frequently they
were used and how they compare.

6. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 4
Interests
By searching for interests related to your business within the
profiles of your followers, you’ll get a good overview of how
your followers relate to different parts of your business. You’ll
also find overlapping interests, which can help you formulate
future content that surprises but still attracts your social
audience. For instance, if you are a yoga clothing retailer and
search for “yoga” within your follower profiles, you may find
the term “Ayurvedic medicine” is often used in profiles which
list “yoga” as an interest. You could do some research here,
and find ways to partner with an Ayurvedic medicine company
for social content, or create content on your own that
somehow relates to this topic.
Roles
Take the role “mom,” as depicted in the our example
“Audience Keyword Analysis” chart. Finding out how many
of your followers put this role in their profiles will tell you a lot
about what kind of content they’d like to see.
Gender
One way to figure out the gender mix of your audience is to
search for common male and female names, or you can do a
search for words like “lady” or “guy.”

7. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 5
Geographic Info
Search for different geographical locations where you know
your brand is strong, then search for geographical locations
where you know awareness of your brand is not high. Compare
the two to find out how much progress you have to make in
your lower-awareness areas. Geographical info (along with
gender info) is available on Facebook, as well.
Industries
By searching for “Works at” and “Work at” within the profiles of
your followers, you can compile a list of the different companies
your followers work at and begin to break down your audience
segments by industry.
Jobs
By searching for specific job title terms like “Lawyer” or
“Community Manager,” you can compile a list of the different
jobs your followers have and break down your audience
segments by job type.
Analyzing your competitors’ social profiles can show you the minute ways
in which your followers and theirs differ or relate. Looking at this metric for
competitors often yields surprising and intriguing results.
Stay Competitive Tip #1

8. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 6
Universities
Often, Twitter users will include their university or graduate
school affiliations in their profiles. By searching for either
specific universities or the terms “University” and “College,”
you can find out a lot about the education level and alumni
ties of your followers.
Now is when you create your lists of audience segments based
on the characteristics most important to your brand, such as
gender or interest in a particular activity. Then it’s time to move
to the next step: finding out how these audience segments
tend to behave.
It’s not enough to carry out a top-level
analysis—you have to get into the weeds,
too. For instance, say you are looking for women
who identify themselves as “wife” in their profiles
because your product tends to be a hit among
married women. You can’t just take the results of
our example “Audience Keyword Analysis” chart at
face value, that 2,233 of your followers are married.
It’s worth giving the profile text a look, too. This is
for two reasons.
One, you may be getting misinformation. When
you look at the actual profile text for “wife”
mentions, some profiles may say “Huge Wife
Swap fan” or “Not ready to be a wife, just living
my life,” which means they don’t fit into your target
audience segment.
Another advantage to going a little deeper in your
analysis is finding common words that signify the
Twitter user is a wife, such as “married” or “marry.”
Pro Tip: Dig In

9. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 7
Audience Behavior
Once you know your audience segments, you’ll want to know how
each segment behaves—especially in relationship to your brand.
How often is each of your audience segments interacting with you?
Your Active, Popular Followers
Which of your audience segments tend to be high-frequency social
users? Which are occasional dabblers? Which have significant social
audiences of their own—and thus reach you can capitalize on?
You want to determine which audience segments are active,
generally speaking.
By looking at a metric like audience distribution by “Date of Last
Tweet,” you discover just how active your followers are. Dive
deeper into the data, and you’ll find out exactly which kind of
active followers you’re attracting so that you can target content
towards those people moving forward.
This chart from Simply Measured’s Twitter Audience Analysis shows
one brand’s audience distribution by date of last Tweet.
Learning about your competitors’ active followers shows you how much
overlap there is between your follower bases, and if they’re tapping into an
active social base you’re not, so you can replicate their tactics moving forward.
Stay Competitive Tip #2

10. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 8
Finding your most influential followers—those who have the
most followers and reach themselves—is a good place to find
social users to partner with to hit one of your chosen audience
segments, or many of them. You can look at their Klout scores
or simply get a sense of their audience size on the networks
where you want to grow your reach.
This list from Simply Measured’s Twitter Audience Analysis shows one brand’s
most influential followers over a given time period, sorted by the number of
followers those followers have. This list can also be sorted by how many people
these influential followers are following, their followed-to-following ratio,
number of Tweets sent, Klout score, and more.
Learning about your competitors’ influential followers shows you how much
overlap there is between yours and theirs, if they’re creating content and
partnerships that attract big social players, and how you can do the same.
Stay Competitive Tip #3
COMPETITORS’
MOST
ACTIVE
FOLLOWERS
YOUR
MOST
ACTIVE
FOLLOWERS
TARGET
AUDIENCE

11. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 9
Brand-Directed Engagement
Mentions
It’s time to find out which audience segments are specifically
mentioning you, and how they’re doing so.
Dig into the mentions of your brand and find out which
follower audience segments are interacting with you most.
This information will also enable you to identify and
subsequently target social users who are mentioning you but
aren’t following you, yet.
This list from the Simply Measured Twitter Account Report shows one
brand’s mentions over a given time period with username, name, Tweet
content, link to the Tweet, and more included.

12. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 10
Engagement as % of Audience
By finding out your engagement as a percent of audience
across all your active social channels and your competitors’ too,
you can see how you’re getting social users to engage with you.
This metric helps you answer the following questions:
• Are you engaging the majority or a small percentage of
very engaged users?
• Are your competitors growing their number of total
followers but not increasing their percentage of
engaged followers?
• Is your engaged audience new or have they been
with you for a long time?
Your audience may change as your brand changes. You may
find that, as your brand grows on social, you need to market
to a different persona or an additional persona.
This chart from Simply Measured’s Cross Channel Social Performance
report shows how one brand’s engagement as a percent of audience
compares across Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest,
YouTube, and Tumblr. It’s the place where you can understand your
ability to connect with your audience segments on specific social
channels within context of one another.

13. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 11
Negative Engagement
Everyone has negative engagement as well as positive
engagement.
Use negative engagement to set a baseline, look for peaks, and
make improvements in the same way you would look at peaks
in positive engagement to continue a trend.
Don’t let a huge follower drop be a nasty surprise on
Monday morning.
Conduct ongoing audience analysis by keeping an eye on how
your audience is reacting negatively to content. You can keep
a running list of things that don’t work and use that list to plan
differently moving forward.
This chart from Simply Measured’s Facebook Page Insights report shows
one brand’s negative feedback stats over time.

14. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 12
Keyword Analysis on Posts
What exactly are people saying about you or to you? Run a
keyword analysis around your designated hashtags or brand
name to find out.
This data will tell you how much your audience is engaging
with you, help you link spikes in mentions with specific social
content, and even allow you to drill down into and peruse the
posts that mention your brand and its hashtag properties.
This chart from Simply Measured’s Cross-Channel Social Performance
report shows one brand’s keyword activity on Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, blogs, forums, videos, and Google+.

15. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 13
Align to Marketing Personas
How do your social audience segments align with your
marketing personas (semi-fictional representations of your
ideal customer based on market research and real data about
your existing customers)?
Data about your social audience segments is of no use if you
can’t understand it in context with your broader marketing
framework.
Bulk Up Your Marketing Personas
You may already have marketing personas but your social
research will give you invaluable additional information for
those personas.
A frequent problem with marketing personas is that they’re
largely built on guesses, aspirations not reality, or expensive
market research.
Josie Brine
Account Manager,
Data Data Data USA
Demographics
• Age 24 - 30
• Female
• $100 - 200K
• Seattle, WA
• BA in Finance
• Married
Goals & Challenges
To lead her department someday. To
own a house. Struggles to maintain
balance between home and work life.
Values & Fears
Values family and maintaining a
high income. Fears not having
enough money for retirement and
not spending enough time with her
family and pooch.
Elevator Pitch
Are you looking for affordable but
luxurious daily care for your small,
medium, or large dog? Look no
further.
Marketing Message
You have one less thing to worry
about now: let us take good care
of your pooch.

16. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 14
Social is a great solution for this problem. If you use it and
analyze it properly, you can get an unprecedented amount of
accurate data on your customers and prospective customers at
a fraction of the cost of traditional market research.
For example, if you conduct analysis on your followers’ bios or
research your recent top engagers and find that your follower
base aligns well with your target personas, you have good
validation for your tactics. If the opposite is true, you get a
wake-up call and can strategize about how to get the followers
you want as opposed to the followers you have.
Who Are You Missing?
After you’ve done the hard work of finding out who is following
you (and your competitors), who is engaging with you, and how
they’re doing so, you might be faced with a troublesome vacuum
where an important target customer or persona should be.
This is actually a good problem to have. Chances are, this
persona is quite specific, and you are successfully hitting other
target audience segments. Now you can begin crafting content
and planning strategies to draw in your missing audience.
Is there a large part of your social audience that you can’t tie
to an audience segment? You want to reduce the size of that
group because, while followers are nice to have, you want to
have an audience that is ready to help your business goals.

17. The Complete Guide to Audience Analysis on Social Media 15
Conclusion
The goal of conducting a solid social audience analysis is to
get rich information on your social audience and share it with
your marketing team regularly. This data opens new avenues
for social content creation and marketing strategies.
How different is your current social user from the marketing
personas you’re targeting? How does this challenge your
assumptions? How can you grow and nurture a smaller
social audience segment or one you that was invisible to
you until now?
By identifying your audience, taking a magnifying class to
the different behaviors within your audience segments, and
aligning your social audiences to your marketing personas,
you’ll have a real leg up on the competition and a much
deeper knowledge of your own brand.
Lucy Hitz is a Social Media Content
Writer at Simply Measured, where she
works on longform content and writes
for the award-winning social analytics
blog. Her favorite musical artist is
Taylor Swift, and you can find her on
Twitter at @LLHitz.

18. Social Analytics Framework
How Audience Analysis Fits In
Our social analytics framework below highlights the essential components of the process that enables marketers to plan
and measure their social programs. Audience analysis fits into the planning process, allowing marketers to understand their
opportunities and challenges as they set strategy.

19. About Simply Measured
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empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social
data to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize
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