Earlier this year Twitter launched audience insights, a free search tool that allows businesses to better understand their audience on Twitter. Twitter audience insights is very similar to Facebook audience insights, and in today’s article I’ll walk you through the basics.
Note: At this moment in time, audience insights only reveals data on users from the United States.
Getting started
To access Twitter audience insights you’ll need to login to your Twitter Ads account. Once in, head to Analytics and select Audience insights from the drop-down menu:
Once you get to the insights dashboard you can find information on the following:
- Overview (snapshot profile of users)
- Demographics
- Lifestyle
- Consumer behaviour
- Mobile footprint
You can choose to find information on your followers, your organic audience or all Twitter users:
For this article I’ve selected all Twitter users so I can walk you through the filtering options.
Filtering your audience
Twitter audience insights groups its users into several different personas. You can target everyone from generation X to seniors, college graduates to business decision-makers:
You can choose to target one persona or all Twitter users. If you target a persona you’ll have limited ability to filter demographic, lifestyle and consumer behaviour later.
After selecting your ideal persona, you can filter users by gender and income by clicking on the Demographics tab. If you’ve selected a persona you will not be allowed to segment by income:
At this moment in time you cannot segment users based on age.
Next up is Lifestyle, you’ll have over 100 options from the dropdown list to select what interests your ideal prospect has. Unlike Facebook, you can only select a single interest:
You can only select interests if you didn’t select a persona.
Consumer behaviour tab provides information on how users shop at grocery stores (odd I know). You’ll have the option to target based on a number of parameters, for example, if you sell luxury products you may want to select ‘premium brands’ or if you offer cheaper solutions, you can opt for ‘value conscious’ :
Once again, you can only use this filter if you didn’t select a persona.
Finally, you can decide to segment users by their mobile device, you can select Android or Apple iOS:
Digesting the results
After selecting all your parameters, Twitter reveals a bunch of cool and useful data on your selected audience which you can find by clicking any of the 5 tabs:
Overview
The overview tab mergers the most important information from all tabs and places them on a single page. It’s useful to get a quick snapshot of your audience but you should really dive into each tab separately to get the most out of audience insights.
Demographics
Demographics returns data on your audience’s average household income, their net worth, level of education, job and marital status:
For me personally, this is the most important tab as it provides me with with data on how much money my prospects earn, their location and typical job roles.This data will be extremely useful when setting up paid ads on Twitter.
Lifestyle
Lifestyle section of Twitter audience insights is a little underwhelming as you only receive information of their interests and favorite TV genres:
The data above is taken from the baby boomers persona, which shows that they are heavily into the MTV culture and reality TV.
If your business targets baby boomers, it might be a wise idea to add some comedy or relate to popular culture with your Twitter ads to see if they receive better engagement than your current method.
Consumer buyer styles
Consumer behaviour reveals how your audience spends their money in grocery stores, what credit cards they own and when they last bought their car:
Okay, so your audience likes to buy a lot of milk and cheese, what are you supposed to do with that information? Sell them cheese!
Only joking, here’s how you should be using it.
How you should be using Twitter audience insights
If you’re using Twitter audience insights to research users outside of your following or organic reach, unless your business focuses on selling consumer goods or cars, it’s pretty difficult to gain meaningful data to plan your campaigns.
The tool was only released a few months ago and still needs a bit of work (in my opinion).
However, it’s extremely useful for providing data on your current following and organic audience. For example, the demographic below of a Twitter account shows that this account targets users from the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States:
With 18% of the total audience coming from Japan, it may be an good idea to translate the most engaging tweets into Japanese to see if they have an impact on sales.
Audience insights at this moment in time is better suited for learning more about your own fans than users outside of your following.
Summary
While Twitter audience insights doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles as Facebook’s counterpart, it’s a free and simple tool to gain a little more insights on your current following and reach.
If you have an active following on Twitter, this tool will help you learn more about your current followers and how you should communicate.
Have you used it before? What do you think?
Nick Bridges
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