Increasing Your CRO With Twitter’s Followers Demographics’ Data

So you have at least 500 to 5000 followers subscribed to your twitter account, but you want to know who your followers are, this way you can target certain campaigns or initiatives to your buyer persona.

Having relevant followers who like, retweet, comment and believe in your brand or product is one of the most important goals you should always strive for when growing your following base.

To increase engagement you want make sure to have as many relevant followers as possible and not so much as to having the most followers. In other words, you don’t want thousands of followers who do not read, like, comment or care for what you have to say on your twitter posts. Having irrelevant followers Is like going to an auto expo to sell office lamps. It is all about quality of followers not quantity.

To achieve higher engagement with your posts, you want to make sure to customize your posts to your type of audience; but who is your audience? What is their gender, age, language, race, economic status, level of education, income level and employment, among other things? These units of data are called Demographics.

VERY IMPORTANT:
Once you collect demographic data, go ahead and begin to build your Buyer Personas

There are tools that can extrapolate demographic data right from your current twitter followers.

Here is a list of some of the tools you can use to obtain demographic data.

Demographicspro.com can extrapolate race, language, location, occupation, and interest data. It is not a free service, but they do offer a free 14-day evaluation including a profile and deep analysis of your Twitter account.

The account also includes limited allowances to test Demographics Pro functionality, including:

– Compare multiple analyses side by side
– Search for accounts influential with a client’s target audience
– Download Analyses and Comparisons as PDF reports and spreadsheets

BY LANGUAGE
The image below shows follower’s ethnicity and language. This is excellent data to utilize for multi-lingual sites and apply it to international digital marketing ads, or international SEO.

BY INCOME

Followers’ Occupation is an important piece of data. For example, you are selling a product or service and you want to be able to pitch your product to the decision makers, like senior managers who approve buying your product.

One of my favorites is the filter option which allows you to tailor your followers by selecting your audience group. For example, you can choose a list of your followers’ occupation by displaying only “Senior Managers” who are usually the ones running the company’s budgets and who approve buying your service or product. Or if you have a luxury item you want to reach followers with the highest income.

Another tool that provides demographics in a very clear and easy to navigate dashboard is StatSocial. It provides your followers’ Age composition, gender, ethnicity, as well as income, education, interest, geo-location and personality insights such as what are their hobbies or what type of shows they watch on TV.

BY RACE

This is excellent for brands who want to market their products with ethnicity in mind. For example, if an ice cream company like Ben & Jerry’s is marketing the new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, the Race Demographic data can show that 26% of their followers are Hispanics, which is pretty substantial. Then the company can create twitter posts for the Hispanic market.

BY AGE GROUP

This type of data allows you to have a clear picture of followers’ age group. For example, the graph clearly shows two dominant age groups: 25 to 34 and 35 to 44 years old. If you are running a promotional campaign on Twitter that is using 100% of its promotional efforts to promote to baby boomers ( ages from 50 to 65), then you can use the graph’s data to notice than 50% of your twitter followers are not in that age group and that in fact about only 20% are. In this case, you need to allocate promotional content that will speak to this younger audience. You can split test your ads variations on different age groups.

Look at an example how jeep capitalized on demographics:

Ad targeting baby boomers

Ad targeting millennials (ages: 18 to 33)

Jeep created a viral video and posted on their twitter account.

BY GENDER DEMOGRAPHIC

Lastly, StatSocial provides gender demographic, and all of us know this is a very straightforward one. Imagine having a twitter account that you thought was targeting mostly men, and after extrapolating your followers’ data you realize the majority of followers are women.

Of course, you can do two of the following things:

1. create twitter post promotions that speak to women
2. or ignore it.

One thing to keep in mind though, is that if your brand has substantial following composed of man and women or LGBT and your ads only speak to men, you might want to be careful not to create a bias conflict–which could bring negative press to the brand– if some of your followers publicly point out the bias. You want to avoid having your brand compromised by having a discrimination situation at hand. Also, you don’t want to overdo it by going to the other extreme like these 10 Most Sexist Ads of 2013.

So knowing who your audience can be one of the most beneficial data for your brand.

For agencies or marketers who are running multiple accounts:
I recommend The Demographics Pro tool for Twitter app in HootSuite. It gives you insights into your own Twitter accounts, followers of other Twitter accounts, and people tweeting hashtags of interest. The app features instant access to Audience Profiles of Twitter account followers, revealing gender split, average age, average income, top cities, occupations, likes and interests, brand affiliations, audience correlations and more.