If you're involved in any form of marketing, then you'll know that understanding your audience is the most important place to start.
Traditionally, you've had to either survey your audience or buy in data sets at a high cost. However, with the rise of social media platforms there's been an ever-increasing amount of audience insight data made available for free.
Facebook's long been the king of this type of data - with their Insights area being great for finding out about your audience, that of your industry, or even your competitors. Social platforms provide this data to help advertisers target their ads effectively, as ultimately the better advertisers results are, the more revenue the social network's likely to make.
With that very much in mind, Twitter has now upped its game in terms of audience insight data. If you go to analytics.twitter.com and login with your Twitter account there are a number of different datasets you can draw upon to get a better understanding of your Twitter following on a new level.
When in Twitter Analytics, navigate to the 'Audiences' tab and you'll see a whole wealth of data on your followers. What's really useful is that you can compare the data from your followers to other audiences on Twitter, with Twitter providing categorization of groups for you to compare to such as:
- Parents
- Generation X
- Professionals
- Millennials
- Baby boomers
- Adults 18-54
- Small businesses
- Seniors
- Business decision-makers
- > $100k income
- College grads
Twitter currently provides audience insight data on:
- Your followers interests
- Household income categories
- Net worth
- Wireless carrier
- Home value
- TV genres
- Aftermarket auto buyer types
- Consumer buying styles
- Consumer goods purchases
Twitter's partnered with DataLogix to amalgamate their audience data with this offline purchase data to create a really powerful dataset.
This insight enables you to understand your audience quickly and easily, and put them into context against other groups of Twitter users.
Take my audience for instance, I can now see that 85% of my audience are interested in technology versus 24% of business decision-makers, and 76% in marketing versus just 2% of business decision-makers.
I can also tell you that 76% of my audience buy premium brands, 15% have a net worth of $1,000,000+, and that 55% of them regularly buy cheese or salty snacks.
Interesting stuff, but you may be asking "how this is of any use at all?"
For a brand, or even a personal brand on Twitter, the more you understand your audience, the easier it is to create a tailored content strategy for them that will work harder to achieve your aims than just posting any content will. Creating content with the knowledge of who your audience is may make you Tweet slightly differently, and with more success, while the insights gleaned can also be used to engage with your audience on other channels more successfully too.
Twitter Analytics is a real step up from what Twitter used to provide, and really brings Twitter data to a new level. For marketers and business owners, this provides another invaluable resource for understanding your audience, and taking the first step to massively improving your marketing efforts as a whole.