From the course: Public Relations Foundations

Developing audience profiles

From the course: Public Relations Foundations

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Developing audience profiles

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- Your consumers want customized communications from people they trust based on what they like and also in a way that's easy to share with friends. To provide this, consider developing a profile that uncovers more about your target as a group. Here's where diving into social media communities allows you to observe the sociology of a network and member behavior. Plus, online communities attract like-minded people who are very different. For example, you have a social media community with members who all love impressionistic art, but the community may attract people from all over the world. They may range from 18 to 54 and have varying levels of income. They may also have varied news and entertainment preferences. Clearly, it's not the demographics that connect them. By digging deeper into your audience as a whole, you'll uncover what drives community excitement and action. To paint a distinct profile, get with your team and answer these questions. What are their, our customers, key issues, concerns, and needs? What and how do these group members prefer to share with each other? What are the benefits and/or the disadvantages of interaction within this group? Asking and answering these types of questions allows you to move from demographics and psycho-graphics into sociology and group dynamics, how they're inspired to act together. Here's one more tip, once you've built your audience profile, you can use technology to monitor online group participation. For example, when you learn where your target public congregates online, social media monitoring tools help you to track their conversations and sharing habits. Some of my favorite free tools include Mention, Hootsuite, and BuzzSumo. You can actually listen to conversations in social networks by tracking keyword clusters or topics across social media, from LinkedIn and Facebook, to Twitter and blog communities. There are also tools including Demographics Pro that uncover a community's favorite brands, influences and influencers, their likes, and even the hashtags or aggregated conversations they follow the most. Today, understanding your audience means going beyond general perceptions. For a more complete audience profile, you have to dive into how people behave together in communities to understand who drives their action.

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