From the course: Strategic Content Marketing: Grow Your Reach on Social Media

Finding the right audience

From the course: Strategic Content Marketing: Grow Your Reach on Social Media

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Finding the right audience

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More than half the world is on social media. Did you know the average time spent on social every day is nearly 2.5 hours? In this lesson, I'll walk through the uses of major social channels so you can determine which are the right ones for you to engage with your audience. I'll start with a few top-of-mind networks, Facebook and Instagram. These social media giants provide advantages in scalability and mobility. A billion people use Instagram every month. Most of them are under the age of 35, and many follow at least one business profile. Meanwhile, Facebook has nearly 3 billion monthly active users and about half of them are mobile-only users. If you're looking to reach people while they're browsing for leisure and entertainment, then these are two great platforms to start with. Let's move on to YouTube. Though Google owns YouTube, it's a powerhouse search engine in its own right. YouTube has a massive global audience. More than 80% of its visitors live outside of the United States, and a lot of Americans use YouTube as well. 96% of Americans that are in the 18-24 age range. In fact, a wide variety of content performs well on YouTube, from vlogs to how-to videos, to product reviews, and even comedy sketches. Now let's turn to a social network that provides a search function similar to YouTube, but has almost the opposite audience; Pinterest. It's essentially a visual search engine. Members frequently use the site to find products, ideas, and inspiration. And the audience is 76% female. Content about travel, fashion, home decor, and recipes have flourished on Pinterest. Now, if your content is better suited for businesses and professionals, then LinkedIn and Twitter will likely be priority channels for you. There are nearly 830 million users on LinkedIn and 55% of them are decision-makers. You'll find companies ranging from Adobe and Marketo to even business to business or B2B digital marketing agencies like mine, all actively engaging and posting on the platform. Now, Twitter isn't only specifically for business content. People follow Twitter profiles based on either being interested in the content's focus, such as a particular subject matter, expertise or popularity and influence, such as celebrities. It has high adoption in areas like tech, media, sports, and politics. The US alone has more than 60 million active users and the platform tends to skew male at 71% globally. Finally, this lesson cannot end without highlighting TikTok. It has over a billion active users. TikTok users spend more than 850 minutes per month on the platform. That's over 14 hours or about 30 minutes a day. Well, 80% are between the ages of 16-34. This data comes straight from TikTok, and there's plenty of representation from the younger crowd as well. If you have a TikTok account, you know how easy it is to get sucked in. It's a platform based on video content. It highly encourages virality and engagement with unique features for creating content and maybe even starting a trend. It's not hard to see that different social networks attract and engage different people and serve different purposes. So before investing energy and time, research which social networks have your target audience. Your effort will pay off with an engaged community ready to embrace your content.

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