Marketing success can feel elusive some days. And reaching target consumers can seem impossible in a sea of competitors with wider reach and extensive resources. But social media audience analysis levels the playing field, capturing key consumer insights that makes messaging resonate and helps elevate your brand.
Let’s check it out!
Who Are You?
Before sorting out what to say to your audience, you need to understand how you’re coming across to them. Who are you in their world? And what are they saying about you? A brand analysis will show what you don’t know, and offers ideas around ways to approach these elusive online inhabitants.
A brand analysis of Popeyes, for example, show lots of positive mentions and a Net Sentiment score of 85% (taken from a range of -100 to 100. It’s a great showing):
And the top conversations are around sandwiches, of course, as there are still shockwaves reverberating online from the great chicken sandwich war of 2019 (Popeyes vs Chick-fil-A).
But what’s this about the “Area 51 raid?”
Popeyes & Aliens – An Audience Analysis
The connection is tracked back to a tongue in cheek (mostly) assertion by those online that Popeyes’ latest chicken sandwich release was a conveniently timed distraction from storming the alleged alien warehouse in Roswell, New Mexico.
And if you think about it, everything about the situation is alien life form bizarre:
- A chicken sandwich supplier running out of chicken and unable to fuel its franchises
- The absolutely insane reaction consumers have had about the chicken sandwich shortages
So Popeyes has an opportunity that it could take advantage of here. That is, assuming they can stock up on chicken sandwiches ahead of the Area 51 Raid on September 20th, which has turned into a free concert for earthlings aged 21+ on September 19th in Las Vegas.
Popeyes chicken sandwich could pair well with Bud Light (the event sponsor), hmm? It’s an interesting adjacency to consider, for sure. And a significant revelation made possible by social media audience analysis.
If you can learn all of that from a brief brand analysis – what would a category or competitor analysis reveal? And imagine how much it could tell a brand over time? Let’s take a look . . .
Category Audience Analysis
A category analysis uncovers numerous key interest areas, behaviors and motivations that are relevant to a target audience:
It helps brands track and understand game changing consumer intel, including ways to:
- Analyze a product’s constantly growing consumer group in real time
- Unlock psychographic insights to understand every layer of an audience
- Build and analyze a custom audience
- Identify an audience’s unique attributes and characteristics
- Uncover real personality traits, interests, and consumption habits for an audience
- Discover emerging trends and unsolicited feedback
And that last bit is info any brand in your category would love to get its hands on. Capturing emerging trends and unmet needs via unsolicited feedback is key to new product/service ideation. It’s some of the most valuable research your brand has at its disposal actually!
Your Competitors’ Audience Deserves Analysis Too
A competitor analysis offers a whole separate set of insights.
Brands can track how well they’re doing against competitors and in the overarching conversation with measures around Net Sentiment, Passion Intensity and brand mention volume over time. As well as viewing side-by-side comparisons showing word clouds and sentiment analysis widgets, offering noteworthy or surprising differences to act upon.
Could Chick-fil-A take advantage of the Area 51 chicken sandwich buzz associated with its competitor? Absolutely! Social web insight is all up for grabs and the quickest to act can win big.
And let’s not forget where these folks are talking. The “sources” breakdown shows where people are talking about your brand and your competitors’ brands. This helps ensure you’re focusing on the right channels, and the right influencers (who are often channel-specific as well):
So you can start posting on Instagram (if that’s where the conversations are happening) and will know what to post (from trending conversations) as well as pain points to address in your messaging. Oh, and you’ll also know which influencers to interact and potentially partner with.
Amazing.
Audience Analysis Is Really All About Them
As much as we’ve focused on sorting out brand and category perception, the insight derived has all really been a consumer-based audience analysis, as it should be. The right research reveals everything a brand needs to know about its current and potential consumers.
And part of that involves exploring who these consumers are behind the tweets, posts, comments and likes. Brands much take their research beyond quick searches to really dig in to the insight. This is why it’s super important to be working in a transparent tool that allows you to do just that.
For example, looking at the chicken sandwich timeline, brands could drill down in the timeline to view the fluctuation summary on any day and then analyze that day as to get further into the results:
Viewing summary metrics on that specific day:
Tracking spikes and dives in conversation on that specific day, with the ability to dig as deeply as you want into the analysis to see who is talking and lots more:
Audience Analysis Rabbit Hole
And then continue down that rabbit hole to explore specific topics and trends. We’re happy to walk you through how to not get lost in that exploration, but the point is – it’s transparent, verifiable data that you can trust.
Were you wanting to target a specific interest area, demographic, or maybe a competitors’ customers, based on the intel you’ve discovered? Depending on your answer, you may want to focus more deeply on bios, behaviors/affinities, location, or sentiment/engagements.
And, in the case of AI Studio, your audience analysis can also include automatically discovered themes around your brand/topic area. It’s pretty neat:
And from there, your campaigns take on a new light. Once viewed through the audience analysis lens, strategic planning is never the same. Nor should it be.
Reach out once your brand is ready to experience audience understanding and marketing success that will have you rethinking that next campaign!
