What You Can Learn from Twitter’s Audience Insights

Twitter has taken another note from Facebook, mimicking Facebook’s Audience Insights and releasing their own.

Twitter’s Audience Insights is just as valuable as Facebook’s, and provides a lot of great information about how makes up your audience and how to best connect with them.

At the moment, we don’t really recommend Twitter Ads in general (depending on your specific audience and niche, this can be different for you) due to high costs.

That being said, using Twitter itself as a free marketing platform is a great way to promote and build your brand and your business, connecting with new audience members. Twitter’s Audience Insights can help you do just that.

How to Access Twitter’s Audience Insights

To access Twitter’s Audience Insights, you’ll click on your picture in the top right corner. This will open a drop-down menu, and you’ll click on “Analytics.”

Once in the analytics section, you’ll click on “Followers,” which can be found in the top left corner of the Page.

This takes you directly to your Audience Insights page, and you can choose to view Twitter’s Audience, your audience, or a comparison of the two.

What Twitter’s Audience Insights Tells You

Twitter’s Audience Insights can tell you a lot.

They break down the your audience into different categories, showing you what percentage of your audience fits into which category. They do this using information they glean from users’ onsite usage, as well as off-site information provided by third party company Datalogix.

The overview at the top of the page will tell you what their most common interest is, what type of lifestyle they follow, what type of buying style is most common, and their most commonly used wireless carrier.

On the rest of the page, Twitter gives you the information about various statistics on your audience, including:

• Interests: Twitter will show you the most common interests shared by your followers, and what percentage of your followers are categorized into having those interests.

• Occupation: Twitter shows you what percentages of your audience fits into different categories of occupations and types of jobs.

• Consumer buying style: This seemingly erratic category breaks down users into how they purchase, having everything from “value conscious” to “vegetarian.” Will all of these be relevant to every business? Of course not. But knowing if your customers are “value conscious” or prioritize “premium brands” can be good intel.

• Wireless carrier: Self-explanatory, this graph will show you what percentage of your audience uses what wireless carriers.
• Household income: This section shows how much your average audience member fits into a household income category.

• Net Worth: Again, self-explanatory, this category shows you which net worth categories your different audience members fit into.

• Marital Status: Not as detailed as Facebook’s relationship statistics, this just shows what percentage of your audience is married, and what percentage is not.
• Education: This shows the highest level of education completed, and what percentages of your audience have graduated from different levels of school.

How You Can Use Twitter’s Audience Insights

Just like with Facebook’s Audience Insights, this information can tell you a lot.

Sometimes the people you think will be your target audience aren’t really the ones who make up the audience that you actually have.

This can tell you two things—one is that you may somehow have missed your target audience and aren’t appealing to them. The other thing it can tell you is how to create content that is more geared to the audience you currently have.

You can adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly. For example, if you find that your audience prioritizes value and tends to be thriftier than what you previously thought, you can focus more on marketing strategies to take advantage of this information. For example, you can host contests with freebies, or advertise sales.

Similarly, if you find that a large portion of your audience has an interest in common that doesn’t directly relate to you, you can still use this interest to create engaging content. For example, if you see that a large percentage of your users like comedy, you can share more humorous content on your profile, and make sure to incorporate more humor into the content you create off of Twitter, too.

Final Thoughts

Twitter’s Audience Insights is a great tool, and it’s a good thing they’ve taken another note from Facebook to create it. I also want to note that their other analytics tools can be useful summaries, but their Audience Insights in my opinion is one of the strongest analytics tools that they offer.

To see more about different advertising options with Twitter, you can learn about Twitter’s Website Cards and how Twitter Ads compare to Facebook Ads.

Are you using Twitter’s Audience Insights? Has it helped you learn anything about how to better connect with your audience? Share your thoughts in a comment below!

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