Ever looked at those graphs and numbers on your social media platforms and wondered what it all means for you and your small business? In this blog, we’ll explain what this is, the importance of audience behaviour, and how you can use this information to target your ideal audience with your social media posts.
What is audience behaviour?
To put it simply, when you look at your audience behaviour, you are analysing the actions taken by your social media followers. This can include (but is definitely not limited to!):
- Likes
- Follows
- Saves
- Tags
- Messages
- Clicking links
- Shares
Closely linked to audience behaviour is your audience’s demographics – for example, age, gender, and general location. Combining and analysing the information you have about your audience’s behaviour and demographics can be extremely helpful, as it will let you know what social media posts resonate the most with your ideal followers.
This is really important – according to Accenture, 87% of consumers say it’s important to buy from a brand or retailer that “understands the real me.” By responding to your audience’s behaviour and tweaking your marketing to best appeal to them, you’re more likely to get more engagement, more followers, and more sales!
Audience behaviour on Instagram and Facebook:
Because both Instagram and Facebook are owned by Meta, you’ll be able to see your audience’s behaviour for both of these social media platforms in one place – the professional dashboard.
Here you can see a huge amount of information, including:
- New followers
- Top posts
- Top locations
- Age range
- Gender
- Most active times
- Link clicks
- Clicks on products
You can change the date range for all of this – so if you want to have a specific look at your audience’s behaviour over the last 7 days you can choose that date range, and if you want a wider look, you can change it to show the last 90 days of audience behaviour too.
Audience behaviour on TikTok:
If you’ve posted at least one public post on TikTok, and you have a business account, you’ll have access to creator tools. This will provide you with some information about audience behaviour, such as:
- Total followers
- Most active times
- Video views
- Profile views
- Comments
- Shares
- Likes
- Gender
- Top territory
- Videos your followers watched
- Sounds your followers listened to
Audience behaviour on Pinterest:
A Pinterest Business account will also give you a lot of insight into your audience and their behaviour. Simply head to the audience insights page and Pinterest analytics, and these pages will tell you:
- Total audience
- Affinities (e.g. your audience’s top interests)
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Device type (e.g. mobile, desktop, tablet)
- Comments
- Impressions
- Pin clicks
- Profile visits
What’s really great about Pinterest is that it allows you to compare your audience to that of all Pinterest users. This will give you more information about your specific followers.
Where to get more information:
It is important to remember that the information available on these social media sites is limited – they don’t all track exactly the same data. That’s why it’s always a good idea to gather more information. This can be done through third-party analytics tools such as Buffer Analyze, Sprout Social and Hootsuite. You can also gain really helpful insights from competitor analysis, as well.
What to do with audience behaviour data:
Once you’ve gathered all the information you can about your audience, it’s time to think about how to use it! It can be a bit overwhelming, but all you need to do is think about what you’re trying to achieve with your social media marketing.
If you want to increase brand awareness, then you should focus on metrics like profile visits, impressions, reach and follows. If creating an online community is important, then you should look at how your audience engages with your social media posts with likes, shares, comments, and saves. And if sales are the focus, then you should look at website clicks and clicks on tagged products.
Now you know what metrics to look at, you can use this information to create posts that will appeal to your ideal audience and help you reach your social media marketing goals. For example, let’s say that you want to create an online community with your business. You know to look at the posts that get the most likes, saves and shares. Once you have identified the posts that perform the best, you can create more posts like these – and take them one step further. If you know that your audience is also mostly based in London, for example, you could make a reference to the city in the post too. This will make it feel much more personal, and your audience is even more likely to respond positively.
Audience behaviour is clearly quite a complex topic, but if you understand who your audience are and why they respond to your posts the way that they do, it can have a hugely positive result for your marketing and your business.
If you have any questions or want to know more about how we can help you understand your audience’s behaviour, then please contact us!
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