If you’ve recently upgraded from Audiense’ free platform to our full access Insights, then you might have noticed that the audience builder looks a bit different, and that you have many new functions at your fingertips. You have the opportunity to create advanced audiences using the advanced audience manager, and like a kid in a candy store, you want to try everything. Well, let me help you to get started to create your first full audience intelligence reports.
If you have read my guide on how to create your first free audience intelligence reports, then you’ll notice how I take a few ideas from there, add some new ideas, and include some more advanced search options. I speak with users everyday and use the platform myself, so my knowledge is a blend of users’ common objectives, as well as how to overcome their pain-points. We can all suffer from the occasional difficulty of inputting the ‘right’ criteria to get the best from an audience intelligence report.
To combat that, in this blog, I’ll walk through methods to achieve a great report, and overcome the obstacles, as well as the tips and tricks that will take your analysis a step further.
One last thing before we jump in, as this is an advanced use of Audiense, I’ll be referring to full use capabilities of the two complementary sides of the platform, which you’re probably already familiar with using: Connect and Insights. So strap in, and let’s begin!
Starting in a new segmentation report, one way you can define your audience is by profile attributes. This area includes: bio keywords, e.g. mum, dad, ceo, runner; location - from countries and regions, to town level; age groups; interests including sub-categories; followers of; and more. To refine your audience, use a combination of these criteria including AND/OR functions. Try it out!
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On the other side of the platform, in Connect, we can create audiences in a similar but more advanced way still. In Connect’s Audience Manager, you can build audiences based on personality traits, including all the attributes you’ve seen in an insights report, and other criteria including likeliness to respond. You can build audiences based on tweet recency, top engagers of my authenticated account, followed by @handle, verified status, member of public lists, and more. You can also combine all of these criteria, for example ‘mentions my account’ and ‘bio-keyword: marketing’, thus you can create your own audience panels based on interactions that matter to you.
Then if you create a dynamic audience, you can also use triggers to build the audience, such as mentioning or retweeting your account.
You can explore all the options for yourself, as there’s many to choose from and combine. Once you’ve built and saved your audience, next time you want to create a segmentation report, you can select this audience from the dropdown list in profile attributes, here’s more details on how to do that.
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This method is quite easy, but a bit different from what we just learned above. As you already know, in Connect, you can add 3rd party accounts, allowing you to easily filter and see the whole audience of any other Twitter user. That means it can include competitors too, and you can easily choose ‘followers of @competitor’ in an insights report.
But did you know that you can use the ‘follows this account’ trigger in a dynamic audience for these 3rd party accounts? This is important because this will be an audience of users recently following the account, collected from when you build the audience. By highlighting active users with an interest in a product similar to yours, they are therefore potentially highly influenceable. As this audience grows, it can signal what kind of audience is currently interested, and can be used to produce an insights report on current trends within new audiences.
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This is also a great method to measure campaign performance. Build a report before the campaign, then run a new one after the campaign and compare the segments, depending on your aim, you might have grown one of your niche audiences, or discovered a new one! Take a look at the shift in influencers’ uniqueness or affinity. If you were to build an audience of new followers after the start of a campaign, you might find they have an affinity to an influencer that was at the forefront of the messaging.
This is an advanced feature you won’t have seen in the basic audience manager! When you come to define an audience in Insights, you can use conversations! You can input keywords, hashtags, and URLs, and we’ll find matching content from the last 30 days to build an audience to create the segmentation report. This can be a great way to find people sharing content from outside sources, including your own website or links. Although, if you want to develop this with added criteria such as a location filter, or a more sophisticated Boolean query, you’ll have to create it in the Connect dashboard.
If you’re wondering what to input, you could look at the content panel of a recent report and choose the top hashtags.
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Another option is to upload a list directly into Audiense from a social listening query you’ve run in another platform. If you’re not already aware, Audiense complements social listening, and makes sense of the data for you. In many cases, users of Audiense might be monitoring particular keywords in a social listening platform for other reasons, such as online customer support, or sentiment analysis. Using Audiense, we can take the work you’re already doing to further understand the people driving the conversation. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that different people and communities will use the same keywords in different ways depending on who they are, and the networks they’re in.
When you come to define the audience in an insights report, select the upload option. Since this method uses the Twitter IDs of the audience, if you already have a list from another provider or means, you can upload this in the same way.
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If you’re finding it difficult to produce a list of Twitter IDs of your audience, you might want to try uploading a list of emails instead. In Connect, you can upload a list of emails, and through a third party tool, Fullcontact, we’ll find matches to their Twitter IDs. This means you could upload lists from your CRM too. They’ll appear as an audience in Connect, and then you can select them when you create an Insights report, just like in step 2.
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Talking about uploads, there’s more you can do. Once you’ve uploaded a list of audience members into Connect, for example from a social listening file, you have the option to combine with filters to narrow down the audience. For example, ‘member of this audience’ and ‘interests: books and literature’ and ‘age range: 25 to 34’ and ‘bio-keyword any of: writer, blogger’. This will create a new audience in your Connect dashboard, which you can then select in Insights to create an intelligence report.
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You might have seen this method mentioned before, but it’s still a great one to use! If you have an idea of the group you’re looking for, but you’re really stuck on how to translate it into Audiense, we can help tailor it in the platform for you.
Take a look at what we have! From parents, to CMOs, to climate change supporters, and more.
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If you’re looking to expand your audience of influencers, you can create lookalikes easily.
When you’re in the influencers panel, simply select ‘add influencers to an audience’ in the actions menu, and they’ll appear in Connect. Since they’re there, when you go to create a new insights report, you can select them from the drop-down (like I mentioned in point 2), and launch the report! When you go to the influencers panel in the new report, you have a whole new set of lookalikes that you can use. Easy!
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Another easy one here, but it can be incredibly illuminating. If you come across a large segment and feel that the insights aren’t drilled down enough, then re-segment it! In the actions menu, select ‘create a report with these segment members’. It’s as easy as that!
Want to see an example of how this worked out? Check out the climate conversation article I wrote!
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How many of these methods have you used? And which ones didn’t you know about? These are my top recommendations based on other customers and users, and my own personal experience at Audiense. If you need any more help with these methods, you can find detailed step-by-step explanations in the user guide!