As of July 2022, there were 4.7 billion social media users worldwide, equivalent to about 59.5 percent of the world's total population, according to an analysis by consulting firm Kepios. In the eyes of every brand owner, this is a coveted commercial resource. But before making a portion of this number (more or less) truly a reliable resource for you, you might want to ask yourself a question:

Do you really know your audience?

1

All growth on social media requires insight into your audience.

On overseas social media, we often see differences in the operational performance of different brand homepages.

Mercedes-Benz and Nissan are both car brands, with 22.77 million and 22 million followers on Facebook, respectively. In the case of no paid promotion and similar material content and quality, the number of likes and shares of the following two posts shows a big gap, which to some extent reflects the difference in audience preferences :

For the same content of the same brand, there will be a large gap in the data performance on different social media platforms. The following is a promotional activity post published by Lazada Vietnam account on Facebook platform and Instagram platform to participate in comments and get vouchers, activities The content, copywriting and materials are exactly the same, but the audience's enthusiasm for participation is significantly more on Instagram than on Facebook:

We took a closer look at the number of followers on both accounts:

Its global Facebook page has 31,819,100 followers (including other regions outside Vietnam), while its Instagram page has only 535,200 followers, far less than Facebook, but the same activity has far more participation than Facebook. Many overseas brands have encountered the differences in fans displayed by media platforms. This requires brand owners and operators to have an in-depth understanding of audiences on different platforms, and explore the composition of fans on various social media platforms and the differences in their interaction habits. .

2

From the effect of content marketing, to the success of promotional activities, and smooth communication with fans, it is inseparable from a deep understanding of the audience. So, in which dimensions do brands and operators need to understand their audiences in order to be better on social media?

From the perspective of audience portraits, there are roughly the following aspects:

Audience Structure Analysis - Who are your audience?

Using the data collected by social media, through statistical analysis, we can obtain the demographic attributes of fans, such as: the ratio of males and females, the geographical distribution of the audience, the composition of different ages and other information.

Fan behavior analysis - what are the characteristics and habits of the audience?

On the basis of understanding the basic structure of the audience, it is necessary to further understand and analyze the influence of social media on the audience, the motives of the audience to choose social media, and the interests, preferences and concerns of the fan group, etc., including your audience's preferences for content and content. tendency.

In addition, the active time of your audience on social media and who are more willing to actively interact with you are also information that needs to be known, which is also necessary information for refined operations on social media.

The above are actually the basic functions and dimensions that audience portraits and analysis should have.

3

For overseas brands, due to the huge differences in regions, cultures, preferences, habits, etc., understanding overseas audiences will face greater obstacles.

Implementing a localization strategy, recruiting members who are familiar with the target market audience, or hiring local people to join the overseas team can eliminate the aforementioned differences and obstacles to a certain extent.

More importantly, data tends to tell you more about your users. In today’s digital age, one of the most objective, effective, and efficient ways to understand your audience is to use analytics tools.

Using Marketing Cloud as an example, let's see how analytics tools can help you.

In the "Audience Portrait Analysis" function under the "Portrait" module of Marketing Cloud, it provides two dimensions of data analysis of audience basic portrait and audience behavior preference for social accounts.

The basic audience portraits are displayed in visual charts for gender and age composition, country and city distribution, language and constellation:

The audience samples used in the audience behavior preference are users who interact with social media posts during the analysis period. Among them, the distribution of interaction time can provide insight into the most active time period of audience interaction, and provide operators with a reference basis for optimizing the time arrangement of post publication, promotion content arrangement, interaction and comment reply and processing. Thereby increasing the chances of getting better engagement and traffic:

Interaction Depth and Interaction Type show the interaction habits and engagement levels of fans on social media platforms:

The audience portrait analysis function also provides a list of audiences with the highest interaction. In the order of interaction frequency from high to low, the user name and avatar, number of interactions, gender, age, constellation, country, city, language and other information of fans are clear at a glance:

Does your overseas social media audience have a clear user portrait? If not, you might as well use the above tools first.

Epilogue

While social media helps you reach a larger audience, it also gives you the opportunity to learn more about your audience. Data analysis can help overseas brands and operators gain more information about your overseas social media audience, helping you gain insight into their habits and what they like or dislike. With the help of big data, I believe that overseas brands can use social media to achieve long-term trust and tacit understanding with more audiences.

All the data in this article comes from public data, and the data acquisition and analysis tools come from Marketing Cloud, a global social media data marketing management platform. If you are interested in the "audience portrait analysis" and other functions of Marketing Cloud, please leave your contact information, and we will arrange overseas social media marketing experts to contact you.