Whether you have a business or a product that you want to promote online, or you are a blogger who wants to target a certain type of audience to bring in the visitors to make his blog successful; it is very crucial to understand the type of audiences that one targets using the social media platform. The key term here is ‘traffic’. The amount of traffic that you get will help the popularity of your business grow, but what you should really target is a particular demographic (type of users). Random traffic will be as quick to disappear as quickly they appear; knowing your demographic will help your hard work ripe, and help retain potential traffic than simply having visitors who will quickly bounce off.
Types of Audiences
Most of the potential audiences of social media are scattered across various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others preferring to read blogs. According to Forrester Research’s Groundswell team, they have categorized profiles of internet users into groups like spectators, joiners etc. The 3 major audience types, or in other terms target audiences, for simplicity, can be categorized as Passionate, Influencers and Ad-Hoc.
Passionate
Passionate are people who are dedicated and care deeply about topics that are too specific, too niche to impact the mainstream subjects. But within those specific areas of interest, they are respected, acknowledged, and their opinions are taken seriously, regardless of the size of their audiences. These people are often the original bloggers, who start off blogging on subjects they are close to, care about and are dedicated enough to keep it interesting.
Influencers
Influencers are group of people who have large pool of followers, across different online demographic. They usually start off as a Passionate, but then they usually evolve into a more mainstream arena, and can even end up as trend-setters. They can even be a part of the modern media, but not all the time.
Ad-Hoc
Ad-Hoc is the casual everyday folks. But they are equally important too, though this group is very hard to make sense of. But by being proactive and patient with as many folks as possible from this group, a brand marketer can gain respect targeting this group, which is eventually noticed by bigger entities. But at the same time, if one only pays attention to a select group that gets noticed too.
To understand and target these three specific types of social media audiences is not easy. To identify this audience in their social media channel is important, and it can be done through many analytic tools available, such as Google Analytics. It can determine the source of your audience by social media channels, which can help you to break down social media traffic from organic or paid search. This will help to further segment the type of audience you get, their source channel, and how they are reaching to you, helping one to successfully manipulate the information to make proper target decisions, and classify audiences that make up the social media what it is today.
About the author: Bethany is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. Beside this she is fond of gadgets. Recently an article on Vending machines attracted her attention. She is loves photography and dreams of owning a 3D Camera.
