Audiences within Social Media

This week our assignment was to read Chapters 7 and 8 from "Social Media for Strategic Communication." Chapter 7 talked about strategic writing for social media, and Chapter 8 talked about audience segmentation and analysis. There was a lot of information in these two chapters, but I want to focus on the types of audiences discussed in Chapter 8.

There are two main audiences, the primary audience, and the secondary audience. The primary audience includes individuals you are looking to target first, these people are your main target. The secondary audience can be linked to the primary, but they are not whom you are trying to reach directly. This type of audience can be someone with the potential to persuade the audience you want to reach first.

There is also an emerging audience. This is an audience that you want to note as an individual. This can be based on monitoring and listening they perform on social media. This type of audience has the capability of becoming a key primary audience over time. Not all audiences are positive ones, there are also negative ones like opponents. These are also known as critics, and they look for negative consequences or outcomes. A critic will always show how they feel about you and will be very active on social media. They will share their negative opinions based on past experiences or they could be unreasonable.

Social media professionals must construct a role for each audience based on demographics, psychographics, social media behaviors, and channel action characteristics to help portray each audience. More information about an audience will result in a social media professional being more informed when creating key strategic messages. By reading this chapter and focusing on the types of audiences, I was able to better understand what these types of audiences are, how they are determined, and why they split into categories.