Understanding the social media audience

Hi, I'm Julie Atherton, and I'm the founder of the social media advisory and marketing consultancy, Small Wonder. I also write books on social media and social media strategy. I'm here today to talk about Understanding the Social Media Audience.

In the previous session, we talked about the ABC of social media marketing and how important the social audience is, and particularly the network element of that social media audience. Today, we're going to talk about how we explain that social media audience, look at the insights that come from social media activity and give us information that's really useful for targeting and marketing to these audiences, and then look at a social media persona—which includes enhanced elements that we don't normally see in traditional marketing personas.

There are a huge number of social media marketing channels and each one is very different from the others. They have different tools. They're used for different purposes. Although people, on average, are on between seven and nine social media channels, they're not all treated equally by us. We'll have a favourite channel, a channel that we spend more of our time on than any other and we'll use these channels for doing different things. A good example would be LinkedIn where we're networking professionally and looking for thought leadership, and would probably be on a very different set of connections to the people that we might be with in WhatsApp messaging groups. If we really think about each of these different channels and their purposes when building a marketing strategy, a marketing plan, we need to understand what objectives you have for your plan, who the audience is, and then, which channels are going to be the best ones to be able to talk to them on, and how they might operate on those different channels.