Social media: know your audience

Anna Friedlander
Sep 6, 2018 · 4 min read

In this article, I’ll outline a few useful tools and sources for digging into audience demographics.

Pew Research Center

The American-based Pew Research Center releases reports on social media usage and users once every one to two years. They have data going back to 2012 so it’s a great source for trends over time.

The 2018 report had some really interesting takeaways. For example, among the people surveyed for the report:

  • Facebook is still one of the most popular and widely used social media platforms out there, but the percentage of people reporting using Facebook has remained flat since 2016.
  • Instagram usage is growing fast, from 28% of those surveyed saying they used it in 2016 to 35% in 2018.
  • People in the 18–24 year old demographic are more likely to use Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube than people in any other age range. 78% of 18–24 year olds use Snapchat, 71% use Instagram, and 94% use YouTube.
  • More than twice as many women than men use Pinterest. Pinterest is the only social media platform that people living in the suburbs were more likely to use than people living in urban areas
  • People living in rural areas are least likely to use any of the social media platforms.
  • The more someone earns (in the income brackets used in the study), the more likely they are to use LinkedIn.

Note that the people surveyed for this report are all based in the US. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not useful if your audience is 100% Sydney based (for example), but if that’s the case, it’s probably worth your while to consider other sources of data too.

Facebook Audience Insights Tool

The Facebook Audience Insights Tool is an absolute treasure trove of data. An easy to use UI means that you can easily zero in on the audience you’re interested in, and if your page has enough followers you can get demographic data for these folks too.

Playing around with the tool I found out that:

  • Wellingtonians love higher education. Among Kiwi Facebook users, Wellingtonians are twice as likely as people in New Plymouth to have a postgraduate degree.
  • Aussies love iPhones. More people in Australia use Facebook on an iPhone than an Android phone, while in New Zealand the situation is reversed with more people using Facebook via an Android phone.
  • Although the US has the second most users of all countries in the global facebook audience, there are no US cities in the top 10 cities for Facebook users.
  • Pick up the knitting needle but the radio — turn it off. Men aged 25 to 34 who are interested in knitting are slightly less likely to be single than men in this age range in general, while men interested in Rage Against the Machine in this age range are more likely to be single.

Social Media News

For monthly updates on Australian Social Media usage across a huge list of platforms, socialmedianews.com.au has got your back. Did you know there are still 70,000 users of MySpace in Australia?

Popular Instagram Hashtags

Webstagram has a list of the most popular hashtags on Instagram. Illustrating just how desperate we all are for followers, when I took a look #follow #followme #like4like and #follow4follow were all in the top 20.

I used Webstagram to rank the Instagram popularity of my job against those of my colleagues here at Friendly Design Co. Not surprisingly, far more posts have #design than #digitalmarketing. But #webdevelopment was on about 1/6th as many posts as #digitalmarketing so at least I’m cooler than someone at Friendly Design Co (right guys??)

Google Trends

While not strictly a social media audience tool, Google Trends can help you discover what different audiences are searching for.

Looking at the relative popularity of Donald Trump, Beyoncé and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in searches around the world, Donald Trump is the most searched in most of the countries in the world. However, in Italy the Duchess is by far the most searched, while in Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa, people are more likely to search for Beyoncé than the Duchess or Trump.

Looking at the Year in Search 2017 trends for what kind of questions people were asking:

  • In Australia people were asking questions like “what is covfefe”
  • In New Zealand people wanted to know “what is the time”
  • In the UK people were asking Google “what is Pink’s real name”
  • In Canada people wanted to know “why is everything so heavy” (perhaps not unrelated to that last one Canadians were also searching for “how to help someone with depression”)
  • In Zimbabwe people were searching for the answer to the question “what is love”, while over in South Africa people were asking “what is happening in Zimbabwe”

I hope I’ve given you somewhere to start when looking for audience insights to shape your social media message. And don’t forget, our Digital Marketing specialists at Friendly Design Co can help you to deliver organic and paid social media content to all your audiences.


Originally published at friendlydesign.co.nz on September 6, 2018.

Anna Friedlander

Written by

Director of Analytics and Digital Marketing, Friendly Design Co

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