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What are Social Media Advertising Audiences?
Social Media Advertising Audiences are the “who” social media advertisements are delivered to. Different platforms have slightly different criteria for targeting an audience, but each allows you to narrow their user base and pick who sees your advertisements. While each platform has slightly different criteria for their audiences, Facebook/Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter each offer the ability to filter a targeted group of users, the ability to upload your own contact list, and the ability to expand on a pre-existing audience by finding their users that closest resemble the users in the audience.
Finding the Right Social Media Platform
Businesses often use a combination of social media platforms. Understanding the nuanced differences of each platform provides insight for messaging and audience building.
What to Consider When Building an Audience
Know Your Campaign Goal
When building an audience, advertisers need to keep in mind the ultimate goal for an ad campaign. Are you trying to send people to purchase something online, to sign up for a webinar, or to download a case study? Each of these outcomes could impact the build of your audience.
Audience Size Matters
With the vast number of filters and the ability to upload your own contacts, advertisers can easily narrow their audiences too far. Each platform has their own requirements for a minimum amount of people in an audience, although they all recommend having a substantially larger audience size than the minimum. Twitter and Facebook ads both have tools in their ads builder to help make sure your audience is the optimal size. LinkedIn recommends audiences are over 300,000+ members for their sponsored content, between 60,000 and 400,000 members for their text ads, and less than 100,000 for their Message Ads.
Privacy is Key
Especially when building an imported audience, make sure you have permission to use the data you are using to generate the audience. Violating privacy laws is a surefire way to make sure your ad campaigns are unsuccessful.
Building an Audience
By narrowing the targeting criteria, advertisers can ensure their ads are delivering to the people most likely to engage with their advertisements and purchase their products or services.
Targeted Audiences
These are the audiences that are built by selecting from a wide criteria of traits such as location, interests, or behaviors to filter the social media platform’s users.
Lookalike Audiences
These audiences take pre-built audiences, such as from a customer list or website visitors and compile a larger audience populated with the most similar users.
Imported Audiences
These audiences are built from a database of customers or accounts, such as a customer list or website visitors and allow advertisers to target that predefined group.