With so many different platforms and places to put your content, knowing just where to put what is harder than ever. It can also be even harder to know which audiences are where and how to appeal to them. Despite these platforms being such a valuable tool at their core, there are so many of them that it can be easy to fall through the cracks and get lost and overwhelmed by the options. Thus, these options turn into a cripple instead of a crutch. The following is a simple guide you can use to understand your audience in order to better match your content to their interests.
1. Relevant Content
The first step to creating content your audience will actually like and want to engage with is actually making sure you know who your audience is. If you have no idea where to start in determining who your audience is or whom you should focus on, there are myriad useful tools available to easily help you do this. One of the best tools to do this is the business feature on social media sites such as Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
To set your account to the business setting, simply go into your account settings and the option will be presented. You may have to view a tutorial for this if you are unfamiliar, but the process is fairly straightforward. Once you have done this, you will then have access to all of the data regarding your account and its engagement.
For example, these analytics are organized into various demographics such as followers’ gender, ages, and locations. Plus, they include where or how they viewed your content and so much more. By doing this, you can instantly start to visualize and organize who your audience is and who to target.
2. Understand Media Consumption
Once you have an idea of who you’re matching content to, then you can begin to dissect and research their unique habits of media consumption. These habits tend to be fairly distinct and easy to identify for each demographic.
For instance, if you are marketing to Gen Z, TikTok and Instagram are your best bets for finding successful engagement. If you market to them on Facebook or Pinterest, you might as well give up your efforts here and now. They view those platforms as outdated and for “old people.” Conversely, if you want to reach Generation X and Boomers, Facebook is an amazing platform to market on, and TikTok is the worst platform to market on because these age demographics are likely to be unfamiliar with that platform.
3. Disperse Your Content
Please note that despite focusing your content on certain platforms, it is also important to spread your content as far as possible on the Internet. For example, while Boomers typically focus mainly on Facebook, it would be very smart to also put your content on Instagram and YouTube as well. This creates more brand awareness. Doing this allows for brand awareness. But lets you also put the majority of your focus into Facebook, where most of your audience is.
Once you have nailed down which platforms your audience uses most prevalently, you can play around on those sites to determine the style of content. It may seem odd that content needs to be site-specific, but it does. Many sites are starting to mimic and copy each other. Yet, most audiences know real, interesting, and original content styles versus knock-off copycats. There is no one, right way to determine which content style is best for which site, but here are some of the basic rules:
Instagram is for curated, very aesthetically pleasing posting. Audiences like pages to have an obvious look and vibe to match your brand. Plus, they expect all reels, stories, and posts to have the same type of fonts, colors, and overall aesthetics. Remember they also want minimal copy on the pages. They want short captions with pretty photos; they don’t want politics or news, most often.
TikTok
TikTok, however, is for interesting, inspiring, funny, or exciting videos. These are short and snippy, audiences on TikTok typically have extremely short attention spans. Your message is best executed if it is clear and straight to the point. Because it is video, visuals are also very important.
YouTube
One last example of the basics is YouTube. YouTube, depending on your audience can be vastly different from both of the latter. Making long, informative videos on YouTube with lots of information can truly work. Because often, YouTube is where audiences go to learn things.
Final Thoughts
The best thing to do, however, when figuring out what type of content is best, is simply to go exploring the sites you want to focus on for your audience. Spend time learning the ins and outs. It is a surefire way to produce the matching content your audience wants to see.
