Every business should be on some sort of social media platform. At a bare minimum, it can improve your lead generation and overall brand awareness in your community. Social media platforms do more than just fill someone’s empty time. Social media audiences and demographics can serve as the perfect staging ground for your most basic marketing push.
But not all social media platforms have the same demographics. They have different audiences, separated most importantly by age and gender. If you’ve found success in your business, you’ve likely done a lot of research into who would want and can afford your product. When your product is for women but is only affordable to women with salaries over $50,000, which is most common for women over the age of 24, you want to target a social media platform with that demographic.
What Social Media Platforms Should You Use?
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, are four of the biggest social media platforms in the world, but they don’t all have the same demographics. Before you spend an absorbent amount of time on the wrong platform looking for your audience, let us break down their demographics.
Facebook has been around since February 2004. Since then, it has amassed billions of accounts, and as of 2022, it averages a staggering 2.91 billion active users every month. While no business will be seen by all of those accounts, the odds of your target audience having Facebook accounts are incredibly high.
But which demographic actively and regularly uses Facebook? The largest age group is adults, ages 25 to 34. They make up 31.55% of Facebook’s monthly users, and these users have a slight tilt towards men at 57%.
This might make it sound like if your target demographic isn’t men ages 25 to 34, you shouldn’t use Facebook. This is not the case. While users ages 25 to 34 are the largest group, that percentage is less than a third of Facebook’s users. If your target demographic isn’t within that age range, nor mainly men, your demographic is still on the social media platform. This means that Facebook is a good place to send out marketing messages even if you have a different social media demographic, however, it probably shouldn’t be your focus.
Twitter is not much younger than Facebook, having amassed 211 million daily users since March 2006. While Twitter doesn’t have the worldwide numbers that Facebook does, it has a vastly different audience. It’s more specific than Facebook’s, which had widespread across age ranges and a nearly even gender divide.
The largest age group on Twitter is 18-29, making up 42% of their user base. That’s almost half of their users within the same age group. The split between those who identify as male and those as female has a wider spread than on Facebook as well. 61.6% of users identify as male versus 38.4% who identify as female.
This means that if you’re trying to target young males between 18 and 29 years old, you want to focus on putting ads on Twitter more than on Facebook. Not only on Twitter but most of your efforts.
TikTok
TikTok is a different animal from the other social media platforms. It’s more about videos and far less about text or images. This means that the content on TikTok is incredibly different from all the other platforms. This doesn’t have to mean more expensive, but because of the different strategies, you’re going to need to put different resources into TikTok.
The common age range for this platform is 10 to 19, making up a quarter of the users. While this is far from a large majority, it is important to note that because the biggest age range is children, there are more rules when marketing. Even if you’re not going after this age range, there are things you need to take into account to stay within the law. Another thing that makes this platform even more different is that its user base leans more towards a female audience with 61% of its 1 billion active monthly users. Even Facebook leaned a bit more male, despite being close to even. TikTok is not like that, which is a third reason why this platform is so different.
Combining the three biggest differences between TikTok and other social media platforms–the young age demographic, the large percentage of female users, and its focus on video–and you have a platform for a specific audience. Whereas with Facebook and Twitter, you’re throwing darts on a large dartboard, with TikTok, it should be easier to be precise. Your odds of finding your target demographic are also pretty great, considering that the average TikTok user spends an average of 89 minutes per day on it, versus the average of 30 and 33 minutes on Twitter and Facebook. TikTok may be different, but it doesn’t set your marketing up to fail.
In terms of content, Instagram is between visual platforms like TikTok and text-focused platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Instagram focuses on images with many features to support video posts as well. It is the third oldest of the four most popular platforms, so like Facebook and Twitter, its demographics are more consistent and even than TikTok. It’s more even than Facebook or Twitter in terms of gender.
The social media site has a nearly 50/50 split between male and female users, with 48.8% identifying as female and 51.8% identifying as male, among its nearly 2 billion users.
Though, like TikTok, it is a mostly visual social media platform. While Facebook and Twitter can post images and videos, with high recommendations that you do, Instagram necessitates it. It also has different dimensions for its images, which means your marketing on Instagram should be paired with TikTok to some extent.
Are Social Media Audiences Getting Too Complicated?
Social media marketing is as complicated as any other form of marketing. Whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, it can feel overwhelming to utilize only one of them well. Utilizing only two or even all four social media platforms to their fullest potential can necessitate a full-time position.
Rather than go in alone, risking your money with a flurry of mistakes, contact a marketing firm that knows how to utilize social media properly. The digital marketing professionals at ENX2 Marketing know how to set up your accounts so that they’re always maintaining a presence online and growing your brand awareness in the minds of your target audience.
For digital marketing assistance, contact our agency today.