The value of your social media audiences is about more than just your follower count or the number of views your video posts get, it’s about customer acquisition. Views and follows should lead to the conversions you need and, eventually, to loyal customers.
Is Reaching an Audience Enough?
Social media platforms make it easy to identify how many times your posts show up on audience screens. For example, TikTok provides a Reached Audience metric, displaying the amount of users who have watched at least a portion of your content. But what happens when those viewers simply see your post, without taking another action? Does that still make them a valuable audience for your brand, or just an example of online vanity? TikTok’s Reached Audience can tell you how many unique viewers your content was put in front of – but is your content reaching, and more importantly being engaged by, the right audience?
Who Is Your Audience?
“Target audience” is a key phrase in social media marketing that you’ve heard one million times before – but it’s no wonder it’s on everyone’s minds. All the content strategy in the world means nothing if you’re not targeting the right audience.
Any digital marketing strategy should include research into the demographics of your target audience. Age, gender, location, income, interests, employment – every piece of information you can find on who your users will be gives you key insight into how to target them. But the job doesn’t stop once you have data on who your audience should be. Your journey to finding, attracting, and connecting with that audience – and determining if it’s the right one – is dependent on what tools you have access to and how you use them.
Audience Data on Social Media Platforms
On any given social media app, you have a world of metrics at your fingertips to determine the success of your audience targeting strategy. You can get more insight into whether you’re reaching your target audience – and if they’re staying to get more content – with the creator tools available on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and others.
Let’s look at TikTok as an example. Along with the metrics you can find on your number of likes, number of comments, and follower count, the data available about your audience is as abundant as it is valuable. TikTok analytics offers a few different ways to check in on your audience.
First, open your Settings and Privacy in the top right corner of the app to access your Followers tab and see:
- Demographics like gender and top territories of your viewership
- Follower activity, including the times and days that get the most activity from your TikTok followers
- Videos and sounds your followers listened to
You can also see metrics on average engagement, follower growth, and more during any given period. In your Overview tab, you’ll find metrics on:
- Profile views: Number of times your TikTok profile was viewed by users
- Followers: Total number of followers on your TikTok account, including new followers
- Likes: Number of likes you’ve received
Head over to your Content tab to find:
- Reached audience: Number of users who watched your TikTok content
- Total video views: Total number of times your TikTok videos were viewed
- Trending videos: Your top 9 videos with the fastest growth in viewership
- Average watch time: How long, on average, viewers spent watching your videos
- Total play time: Total time users have spent watching a video (great for comparing to other posts to assess video performance)
- Video views by section: Which traffic source type your TikTok posts come from, whether from the For You Page (FYP), trending hashtags or sounds, Following feed, or searches
Your LIVE tab metrics also includes total views, new followers, top viewer count, unique viewers, and other data about your live videos.
Using Your Metrics to Determine If You Have the Right Audience
TikTok isn’t the only platform with an intelligent algorithm designed to make content creation and improved engagement rates easy. With a wealth of data like that listed above, it should be simple to understand whether you are reaching the right audiences with your social business accounts.
But it can be challenging to decipher what the “right” audience looks like with so much data thrown at you, and without a specialist on your team.
Put simply: there’s a difference between getting only views and getting more valuable conversions. You might have followers watching the opening three seconds of your videos or the first two words of a post and then scrolling right past. Or, you’ve reached a niche audience that watches your full video or reads an entire post but doesn’t convert because they have no real interest in your offering. In those cases, you could be reaching the wrong audience.
That’s where a deeper understanding of your target audience – and a tactical approach to your data – comes into play. Your marketing campaigns should rely on what you know about your target audience in addition to the data and analytics you have for each unique social platform and the type of content you post.
View analytics like the ones described above are essential for determining whether you’re reaching and engaging with your audience. Finding discrepancies is the key to improving your TikTok strategy and approach to other socials. However, social media analytics aren’t the only tools you can use to get that. So what is the right strategy?
The Solution? A Partner Who Understands the Right Audience Reach
Experience with audiences across a range of niches – along with technology designed to find even more insight into what drives users to action – gives First Media an advanced understanding of your target audience.
Taking an organic approach, we create custom content and distribute it on our brand channels, exciting and attracting audiences through visual storytelling and developing the maximum amount of reach. That mass awareness is combined with tools like CAT, our comment analysis AI, to develop content that reaches your audience, wherever they are, driving them to real-world action. We can extend the knowledge you gain from social media analytics and merge that with proprietary technology and key valuable experience to help you answer the questions: Am I reaching the right audience? And if not, how can I get there? Partner with First Media to access creative content that inspires target audiences with expert, data-driven precision.
