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Public Segmentation with Social Media

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Social Figures
Social Figures

This document discusses segmentation strategies for understanding public audiences on social media. It describes demographic segmentation based on attributes like age, gender and location. Psychographic segmentation is also covered, which examines interests, behaviors, activities, opinions and lifestyle factors. The document states that combining available social media data with these segmentation approaches can provide strategic benefits for companies to better understand consumer behavior and effectively target their audiences.

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PUBLIC SEGMENTATION WITH SOCIAL MEDIA Demography, Psychography and innovations in understanding the public via Social Media
SUMMARY Contents: Segmentation and target-group: understanding and targeting networking 3 Demographic Segmentation: attributes and characteristics 4 Psychographic Segmentation: interests and behaviour 5 Demographic, Psychographic and other types of social media segmentation 7 Applying segmentation in social media 9
SEGMENTATION AND TARGET AUDIENCE: LEARNING AND TARGETING WITH THE NETWORKS Segmentation is one of the most powerful concepts of marketing in order to help reach your business reach its objectives: from the creation of adverts to client relationships, segmentation means using the best tactics and tools for each specific group of the population that you wish to target. In an ideal world, one-to-one relationships signify a super segmentation: a person is seen in all their individuality and their past, profile, likes and preferences can be obtained. Today, several brands have literally millions of fans, followers or readers on social networks. Periodically, rankings and lists are published highlighting the fan pages with the greatest number of followers and other simple quantitative indicators. Practically all big brands in Brazil create a substantial presence on social networks, but many companies still do not adequately harness the potential of these enormous networks as real laboratories of understanding the behavior of public consumers. Listed below are some of the public data that is explicitly available.  The age group of fans on social networks  Gender  Fan locations and transmitters of messages  Profiles and pages cited by the engaged public  Friend lists  A range of other data sets relating to characteristics, attributes and behavior. To connect all this information to concepts of public segmentation could hold significant strategic benefit for companies and agencies. The idea of segmentation involves dividing the market into different parts to be specifically targeted with offers of products and communication. Declan Bannon1 lists a few of the benefits of market segmentation:  It encourages the development of products and services by combining the criteria for success of a segment  It allows consumers to be targeted by communication and distribution channels  It helps analysts identify opportunities and threats  It allows the allocation of resources to areas where there will be the best result  It encourages the analysis of other competitors. Even in the specific context of communication, the techniques in market segmentation maximize the efficiency of strategies and tactics. To know the public better means knowing how to speak to them better, offering communication and adverts that have a relationship with their audience and understand the language in which they communicate. When we talk about corporate communication, there are a few more common segmentations: demographic, psychographic and consumer segmentation, all of which have a role to play within social media.
DEMOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION: ATTRIBUTES AND CHARACTERISTICS Demographic characteristics are the most obvious form of segmentation but often do not constitute much meaningful information. Gender, country, district, ethnicity and socio-economic background are the main general categories that can be used as a parameter in the understanding of common characteristics in large numbers of people Historically, demography has been used by governments and large organizations to ensure their efforts and measures are carried out in a more targeted and specific manner to help them achieve their objectives in a precise way. Changing social structures and social trends call into the question the meaningfulness of demographic data as a means of targeting services. Western societies establish roles, expectations, opportunities and problems specifically to men and women. In a cultural specific context, some types of products are almost exclusively used by one gender. Communication is clearly directed to a gender using articles (amigo or amiga for example). But times are changing, and gender equality is far more prominent on the political and social agenda than ever before. This has important repercussions for marketing and communication, and agencies need to become more aware of campaigns or advertisements that could be seen as discriminative or fail to understand changing social trends that directly affect their target audience. Divisions between country, state and city are acutely related to questions of culture, economics and behavior. To speak of a Brazilian, Italian or a Japanese highlights a mentally abstract persona. In Brazil the differences in states are quite relevant. The location of a consumer tells us things, with varying degrees of precision about the economic situation, patterns of cultural activity, dress, eating patterns and products consumed. In some cases, location is an exclusive factor in marketing: a product or service can be known nationally, but only be distributed in particular market squares or towns. Dealing with monitoring based on textual searches requires a knowledge and understanding of language, idiomatic expression, slang and linguistic customs. The amount of slang and specific names for products, food and different actions is enormous. Even interjections are used in a particular way: what might seem like an insult in one Brazilian state is in fact a compliment in another. Associated with age, we have general activities relating to specific age-groups. Toys and games, eating habits, general consumption and relationship status are defined in a way that is often very different to Western societies. One of the products most obviously linked to age-groups are chocolate mixes, alcoholic drinks and anti-wrinkle creams, with the big fast trading brands possessing a number of sub-brands for different age groups. The diverse methodology to accurately define socio-economic classes have been created, evolved and discussed throughout the years. In Brazil the criteria are defined by the Brazilian Association of Research Companies2 , classifying the socio-economic classes from 1 to 7, with 1 being the class experiencing the best living conditions and 7 referring to people in a situation of poverty or extreme poverty. The crossing of these demographic categories already offers exhaustive amplitude of ways of defining segments. As an exercise, if you multiplied 27 Brazilian states by 2 genders, 5 generations and 7 socio- economic categories there are already 1890 possible permutations. BrandCare, social media monitoring tool of Social Figures, it possesses advanced resource of geolocalisation on Twitter.
PSYCHOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION: INTERESTS AND BEHAVIOURS With the strengthening of global capitalism, the increasing diversification of consumption and the emergence of niche cultures in the second half of the 20th Century, demographic segmentation has become less reliant on certain necessities. Religion, region, nationality and gender have stopped being such staunch categories: individuals no longer retain these categories throughout their whole life as individual and community identities shift more and are often in a permanent state of change. Adding to the demographic and geographic segmentations is a more individualized and behavior- based ways of life which gathers data about Activities, Interests and Opinions (AIO). For the large part, this type of classification is due to the transformation of consumer behavior in the second half of the 20th Century. Traditional institutions such as the State, the Church, the Family (and Generation) are no longer responsible for such definite behavior in an individual. Other types of affiliation to groups in popular culture (musical and stylistic niches), social causes (feminism, LBGT, ethnic minorities) or even consumer based groups (the fans of the rival Android or iOS) are as important in regards to how organizations understand the customer. In this way, the analyzing of AIO constitutes a psychographic approach. This is an approach that observes behavior based on what a person thinks about a particular subject or social matter, their consumer patterns or what their general interests are. This involves such as attitudes towards health, eating, other social groups, musical interests, literature, sport and political affiliation. Joseph Plum 3 , written 40 years ago, remains relevant to AIO work in the present day: Activities Interests Opinions Work Family Self Hobbies Home Social Questions Social Events Employment Politics Holidays Community Business Entertainment Recreations Economy Club Membership Fashion Education Community Food Products Shopping Media Future Sport Achievements Culture activities and frequently purchases products relating to sport, gymnastics and physical fitness, it suggests that this person is physically active and places a high personal value on physical activity and keeping fit. Achieving goals is part of their life and notions of self-fulfillment can be valued. Similarly, and individual who has recently become a parent will pay more attention to selective messages relating to newborn children. One of the most relevant public categories for years in the United States are the so called Blogger Moms who use blogs and social media to share and exchange messages, photos and ideas about children, pediatrics, infant feeding or the joys and challenges of being a Mother.
Another recurring example is the way that certain groups access news and media organizations. To discover what type of media (journals, newspapers, portals, and social media) is most used for one cross- section of the public creates the possibility of developing media plans and product placement strategies. Consumer opinions generally reflect predispositions for behavior and are ways of identifying various layers album have the potential to have an enormous influence on the creative market. Opinions held by consumers in regards to their attitude towards the future can also be indicative of a more wary or confident profile. If a group feels that the future holds good opportunities and financial prosperity, it is also probable that this is a group willing to make large purchases or use credit cards for example. Understanding the different profiles of activities, interests and opinions of the public means developing products, communication and marketing aspects that attend to their explicit and implicit needs and avoiding attitudes that they find displeasing.
DEMOGRAPHY, PSCYHOGRAPHY: AND OTHER TYPES OF SEGMENTATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA The possibility of segmenting groups of people and consumers is directly proportional to the amount of data that can be obtained from them. Developments with the web 2.0, social media and a range of evolutions in technology, behavior, social standards and economics have created a boom in social statistics. Segmentations is the basis for better internet businesses today. Google turns over billions of dollars principally by managing to offer public segmentation information using interests in real time: advertisers can show an advert to somebody who is looking for information in real time. Facebook also uses demographic segmentations using gender, age, locality, associations and interests in types of pages which in turn represent other interests - in order to offer targeted publicity. It is very important for this type of organization to know what your existing specific audience is, if this corresponds with your target group and what characteristics the people speaking about your brands and products have. The demographic segmentation in social media varies a lot in accordance with each type of media platform. In general principal demographic information such as location, gender and age are available. The ople seek to express themselves and identify themselves using their profiles, showing information such as their name, location, age, profession and area of work. In some cases, there is metadata. This is data that accompanies references monitoring social media, allowing monitoring analysts to filter their analyses in accordance to location. Social media allows people to connect with others all over the world. But the general use of it showed an interesting phenomenon: users tend to connect and converse with people they know are online already. This means that when conversing or interacting with somebody with a specific profile demographic, users also tend to affect people with the same profile demographic within the wider user network. Psychographic segmentation in social media can be developed by perceptions, collected directly or indirectly, about what users are interested in and how they behave as a result. In relation to their interests, a short list of pages in reference to Facebook, or on corporate profiles followed on Twitter, is an important source. If a person is quite interested in extreme sports pages, and presents themselves as a sportsperson, it is likely that they will have behavioral characteristics associated with this area. Psychographic information based on interests, in general, is much simpler and easily collected from social media. The act of following profiles, pages or blogs, and especially sharing and suggesting posts, news and terests. These interests are particularly relevant as they reveal how the user wants to be portrayed to the imagined public, their friends, colleagues and others. Social media focused on mobile devices, such as Twitter and Instagram, bring opportunities for instantaneous analysis of segments. One of the first mottos of Twitter was simply to state what you were doing, allowing the user to share their activities with others. Applications like Instagram still allow users to identify with views and cameras, uniting activities and interests. Social media continues to offer a lot of relevant information about us in a digital atmosphere. The level of activity on the internet is one of the ways of segmenting a profile relating to the behavior of the user on social networks. From the least active users to the most active users, Peter Brandtzaeg and Jan Heim4 propose the following categorization:  Sporadics: those users who use media sporadically, generally avoiding frequent access or newcomers to the market.  Lurkers: the most frequent user of social networks. Those users that read, consume and watch
 Socialisers: Those users who focus on social aspects. Not necessarily producing a lot of original content, but share and converse with their contacts.  Debators: Is the category closest to bloggers, activists and for those who are interested in discussing and presenting their own ideas and points of view.  Active Users: these are the most active users contributing a lot of content and heavy users of social networks. To understand the characteristics of audiences in accordance with their level of activity is essential. The profile of a consumer of determined types of products can vary a lot. For example, faithful devotees of some smart phone brands tend to be Active Users, whereas consumers of life insurance, beyond being a more advanced age-group (still an indicator of less frequent activity on social media) have fewer reasons to act spontaneously with pages or profiles to do with security. in relation to brands and the way in which they interact with adverts. This can also be divided into public segments and classification as highlighted below:  Brandlovers: consumers who love the brand and are not afraid to express it. They are always indicating this to their friends and network.  Brand Advocate: consumers who defend a brand whenever they can or in situations of consumption.  Interactors: Part of the public that, even though they may not necessarily be a consumer, interact  message, but are not interesting in making a point or interacting.  Unsatisfied: consumers who interact when a problem occurs and use social media, in a public way, to resolve it.  Brand destroyers: due to the unresolved dissatisfaction or prolonged problem with a brand or product, the brand destroyers are the consumers that feel offended and join to retaliate.  Trolls: people who, even without a specific motive, want to damage a brand, most often for no reason. Social media also shows the links between people. A whole market of relations and influences was created this way. Blogging networks or advertising platforms return to social media to explore this aspect. So, the idea of influence is one of the core values in social media and also can be seen as a way of segmenting the public into different layers. Indexes of influences based on algorithms, despite not being as precise as in-depth human study, are quick and useful. Brand Care, for example, allows user classification in accordance with Klo bigger the power to broadcast a message a user has. It also allows agencies to first listen to what influential consumers are saying, creating the possibility for both positive repercussions as well as the avoidance of spreading crises. The Top Profiles resource allows to discover which twitter users are most influential in each country, State or City through the Klout metrics.
APPLYING SEGMENTATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA Report of Public Profiles in Social Media A first application of the public segmentation in social media is to discover or design segments of the public in accordance with its business. It is recommended to develop these reports with a large quantity of data coming from monitoring, relationship and marketing tools of the company. The report can be updated bi-annually to identify how consumers have changed. For example: o Its hotel network possesses different traveller profiles. The autonomous business traveller, the business traveller, the married traveller, the family traveller. What are their worries? How do they search for and publish information in social media? o Is it a company with physical and electronic shops? Are the clients of one type different from the other? Use social media, crossing data from your CRM with the monitoring of social media to discover differences. o What do the 40 thousands followers of your brand of sparkling wines look like? Are they just consumers? What is the gender distribution? How many are cosmetic bloggers? How many are drinks distributors alert to the market's novelties? How are you able to communicate with each and every one of them? Voter against Non-Voter in Political Campaigns In Brazilian political campaigns, we are talking principally of personal brands. Confidence of the Brazilian voter in a specific politician is the most decisive factor when it comes to casting the vote. In a country such as Brazil with a vibrant political discourse, citizens, militants and communicators share opinions about politicians and candidates across the whole country, especially if they are involved in questions of popular interest. However when elections for Governments of States, Towns, Legislative Assemblies and Chamber of Councillors are running, the geographic segment is decisive. o What do users say when they comment on the political blogs of the city and its candidate? Which are the implicit interests that point to the concerns of the electorate? o Of the spontaneous militants, how much are in the electoral sphere of its candidate? What are its characteristics compared to militants of other states? o What is the online journalistic coverage difference between local papers and national papers about the candidate? o Who are the detractors of the brand? Are they from other cities or states? Public in the Social Media x Target Audience of the Brand Not everyone is on social media and not everyone that is on social media is the target audience of the brand. However, are the people that are connecting and conversing with the brand those in the target audience or BrandCare allows you to check out which were the users that most mentioned the searched terms and/or most interacted in the properties of the brand.
are they different? It is possible to make this comparison to generate various types of insight: o Prove that your media campaign produced results by bringing people from the target audience of the brand to converse with the company; o Carry out a public profile analysis focused just on the public of the social media that plays a part in the target audience of the products. Develop an engagement action plan that favours this slice of the public. Lawyers versus Detractors of the Brand Remember those customers that complain ten times more when the product of your company is delayed. Can a demographic or psychographic characteristic explain this? Looking more closely at the similarities and differences in each one of these categories can shed light on the conversational tactics in order to promote positive mentions and reduce negative mentions. o What is the profile of activities and interests of your client? Do they recognize and are they used to new technologies? A technological solution such as an app for a Smartphone could improve the sales process? o What do users that complain more emphatically about a hotel network have in common? Measuring opinions and attitudes in comments Very frequently posts on pages on Facebook or user blogs become a space for debate amongst users about their preferences for a particular product, methods of use, political positions and other behaviours. Observing these interactions is an important starting point for further questions. o The public of the different brands of drinks of the conglomerate interacts in a playful way with messages about the relationships between men and women. What are the different cultural positions of this public consumer in relation to relationships and sex? o What are the opinions of different segments of the public in relation to male waxing? To survey online communities such as Facebook groups and forums concerning beauty can help in the launching of a campaign linked to this behaviour, although it is a controversial topic in some societies. The global market for public segmentation is huge and the market will constantly offer more opportunities for seeing the way in which consumers participate in social media. The monitoring of data and conversations on such a global scale presents the greatest challenge to use from an intelligence and overview perspective.
s . GET TO KNOW BrandCare is an online social media monitoring software which uses keywords in order to collect relevant messages from networks and analyze them. We attend to agencies, companies, politicians and consultancy firms that wish to explore the force of social media for: communications with consumers and voters, to avoid and manage crises, to deeply understand the public through studies, benchmarks and surveys.  Monitoring of Social Media and sources of data: Blogs, Facebook (Mentions), Facebook Pages, Forums, Google+, Instagram, News, Orkut, Twitter, Videos and Yahoo  Tools for analysis of feeling and categorisation of collected mentions  Communication and interactions with users on Facebook and Twitter  Keyword alerts for the prevention of crises and using of opportunities  Advance and interactive geo-localisation resources in countries, states and cities  Intelligent organisation of searches and results in searches, keywords and topic matters  Differential in the cost-benefit in order to monitor feeds, Twitter profiles, fan pages and blogs for surveys, advanced studies  Top Profiles resource which allows, with a growing database of millions of profiles, to research the most influential Twitter users of each Country,State or City  Automatic generation of reports in diverse formats (PDF, Word, Excel) with the data and analysis carried out. 1 BANNON, Declan P. Marketing Segmentation and Political Marketing. Political Studies Association, 2004. 2 Novo Critério de Classificação Econômica Brasil http://www.abep.org/novo/Content.aspx?ContentID=882 3 The Concept and Application of Life Style Segmentation Joseph T. Plummer http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1250164?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103372248033 4 A Typology of Social Networking Sites Users http://www.academia.edu/906922/A_Typology_of_Social_Networking_Sites_Users www Get to know more about Brand Care on our website. qTo get in direct contact with us, just call 02 8034 9087 RCheck out more content and our social media through the blog Social Figures.

More Related Content

Public Segmentation with Social Media

  • 1. PUBLIC SEGMENTATION WITH SOCIAL MEDIA Demography, Psychography and innovations in understanding the public via Social Media
  • 2. SUMMARY Contents: Segmentation and target-group: understanding and targeting networking 3 Demographic Segmentation: attributes and characteristics 4 Psychographic Segmentation: interests and behaviour 5 Demographic, Psychographic and other types of social media segmentation 7 Applying segmentation in social media 9
  • 3. SEGMENTATION AND TARGET AUDIENCE: LEARNING AND TARGETING WITH THE NETWORKS Segmentation is one of the most powerful concepts of marketing in order to help reach your business reach its objectives: from the creation of adverts to client relationships, segmentation means using the best tactics and tools for each specific group of the population that you wish to target. In an ideal world, one-to-one relationships signify a super segmentation: a person is seen in all their individuality and their past, profile, likes and preferences can be obtained. Today, several brands have literally millions of fans, followers or readers on social networks. Periodically, rankings and lists are published highlighting the fan pages with the greatest number of followers and other simple quantitative indicators. Practically all big brands in Brazil create a substantial presence on social networks, but many companies still do not adequately harness the potential of these enormous networks as real laboratories of understanding the behavior of public consumers. Listed below are some of the public data that is explicitly available.  The age group of fans on social networks  Gender  Fan locations and transmitters of messages  Profiles and pages cited by the engaged public  Friend lists  A range of other data sets relating to characteristics, attributes and behavior. To connect all this information to concepts of public segmentation could hold significant strategic benefit for companies and agencies. The idea of segmentation involves dividing the market into different parts to be specifically targeted with offers of products and communication. Declan Bannon1 lists a few of the benefits of market segmentation:  It encourages the development of products and services by combining the criteria for success of a segment  It allows consumers to be targeted by communication and distribution channels  It helps analysts identify opportunities and threats  It allows the allocation of resources to areas where there will be the best result  It encourages the analysis of other competitors. Even in the specific context of communication, the techniques in market segmentation maximize the efficiency of strategies and tactics. To know the public better means knowing how to speak to them better, offering communication and adverts that have a relationship with their audience and understand the language in which they communicate. When we talk about corporate communication, there are a few more common segmentations: demographic, psychographic and consumer segmentation, all of which have a role to play within social media.
  • 4. DEMOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION: ATTRIBUTES AND CHARACTERISTICS Demographic characteristics are the most obvious form of segmentation but often do not constitute much meaningful information. Gender, country, district, ethnicity and socio-economic background are the main general categories that can be used as a parameter in the understanding of common characteristics in large numbers of people Historically, demography has been used by governments and large organizations to ensure their efforts and measures are carried out in a more targeted and specific manner to help them achieve their objectives in a precise way. Changing social structures and social trends call into the question the meaningfulness of demographic data as a means of targeting services. Western societies establish roles, expectations, opportunities and problems specifically to men and women. In a cultural specific context, some types of products are almost exclusively used by one gender. Communication is clearly directed to a gender using articles (amigo or amiga for example). But times are changing, and gender equality is far more prominent on the political and social agenda than ever before. This has important repercussions for marketing and communication, and agencies need to become more aware of campaigns or advertisements that could be seen as discriminative or fail to understand changing social trends that directly affect their target audience. Divisions between country, state and city are acutely related to questions of culture, economics and behavior. To speak of a Brazilian, Italian or a Japanese highlights a mentally abstract persona. In Brazil the differences in states are quite relevant. The location of a consumer tells us things, with varying degrees of precision about the economic situation, patterns of cultural activity, dress, eating patterns and products consumed. In some cases, location is an exclusive factor in marketing: a product or service can be known nationally, but only be distributed in particular market squares or towns. Dealing with monitoring based on textual searches requires a knowledge and understanding of language, idiomatic expression, slang and linguistic customs. The amount of slang and specific names for products, food and different actions is enormous. Even interjections are used in a particular way: what might seem like an insult in one Brazilian state is in fact a compliment in another. Associated with age, we have general activities relating to specific age-groups. Toys and games, eating habits, general consumption and relationship status are defined in a way that is often very different to Western societies. One of the products most obviously linked to age-groups are chocolate mixes, alcoholic drinks and anti-wrinkle creams, with the big fast trading brands possessing a number of sub-brands for different age groups. The diverse methodology to accurately define socio-economic classes have been created, evolved and discussed throughout the years. In Brazil the criteria are defined by the Brazilian Association of Research Companies2 , classifying the socio-economic classes from 1 to 7, with 1 being the class experiencing the best living conditions and 7 referring to people in a situation of poverty or extreme poverty. The crossing of these demographic categories already offers exhaustive amplitude of ways of defining segments. As an exercise, if you multiplied 27 Brazilian states by 2 genders, 5 generations and 7 socio- economic categories there are already 1890 possible permutations. BrandCare, social media monitoring tool of Social Figures, it possesses advanced resource of geolocalisation on Twitter.
  • 5. PSYCHOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION: INTERESTS AND BEHAVIOURS With the strengthening of global capitalism, the increasing diversification of consumption and the emergence of niche cultures in the second half of the 20th Century, demographic segmentation has become less reliant on certain necessities. Religion, region, nationality and gender have stopped being such staunch categories: individuals no longer retain these categories throughout their whole life as individual and community identities shift more and are often in a permanent state of change. Adding to the demographic and geographic segmentations is a more individualized and behavior- based ways of life which gathers data about Activities, Interests and Opinions (AIO). For the large part, this type of classification is due to the transformation of consumer behavior in the second half of the 20th Century. Traditional institutions such as the State, the Church, the Family (and Generation) are no longer responsible for such definite behavior in an individual. Other types of affiliation to groups in popular culture (musical and stylistic niches), social causes (feminism, LBGT, ethnic minorities) or even consumer based groups (the fans of the rival Android or iOS) are as important in regards to how organizations understand the customer. In this way, the analyzing of AIO constitutes a psychographic approach. This is an approach that observes behavior based on what a person thinks about a particular subject or social matter, their consumer patterns or what their general interests are. This involves such as attitudes towards health, eating, other social groups, musical interests, literature, sport and political affiliation. Joseph Plum 3 , written 40 years ago, remains relevant to AIO work in the present day: Activities Interests Opinions Work Family Self Hobbies Home Social Questions Social Events Employment Politics Holidays Community Business Entertainment Recreations Economy Club Membership Fashion Education Community Food Products Shopping Media Future Sport Achievements Culture activities and frequently purchases products relating to sport, gymnastics and physical fitness, it suggests that this person is physically active and places a high personal value on physical activity and keeping fit. Achieving goals is part of their life and notions of self-fulfillment can be valued. Similarly, and individual who has recently become a parent will pay more attention to selective messages relating to newborn children. One of the most relevant public categories for years in the United States are the so called Blogger Moms who use blogs and social media to share and exchange messages, photos and ideas about children, pediatrics, infant feeding or the joys and challenges of being a Mother.
  • 6. Another recurring example is the way that certain groups access news and media organizations. To discover what type of media (journals, newspapers, portals, and social media) is most used for one cross- section of the public creates the possibility of developing media plans and product placement strategies. Consumer opinions generally reflect predispositions for behavior and are ways of identifying various layers album have the potential to have an enormous influence on the creative market. Opinions held by consumers in regards to their attitude towards the future can also be indicative of a more wary or confident profile. If a group feels that the future holds good opportunities and financial prosperity, it is also probable that this is a group willing to make large purchases or use credit cards for example. Understanding the different profiles of activities, interests and opinions of the public means developing products, communication and marketing aspects that attend to their explicit and implicit needs and avoiding attitudes that they find displeasing.
  • 7. DEMOGRAPHY, PSCYHOGRAPHY: AND OTHER TYPES OF SEGMENTATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA The possibility of segmenting groups of people and consumers is directly proportional to the amount of data that can be obtained from them. Developments with the web 2.0, social media and a range of evolutions in technology, behavior, social standards and economics have created a boom in social statistics. Segmentations is the basis for better internet businesses today. Google turns over billions of dollars principally by managing to offer public segmentation information using interests in real time: advertisers can show an advert to somebody who is looking for information in real time. Facebook also uses demographic segmentations using gender, age, locality, associations and interests in types of pages which in turn represent other interests - in order to offer targeted publicity. It is very important for this type of organization to know what your existing specific audience is, if this corresponds with your target group and what characteristics the people speaking about your brands and products have. The demographic segmentation in social media varies a lot in accordance with each type of media platform. In general principal demographic information such as location, gender and age are available. The ople seek to express themselves and identify themselves using their profiles, showing information such as their name, location, age, profession and area of work. In some cases, there is metadata. This is data that accompanies references monitoring social media, allowing monitoring analysts to filter their analyses in accordance to location. Social media allows people to connect with others all over the world. But the general use of it showed an interesting phenomenon: users tend to connect and converse with people they know are online already. This means that when conversing or interacting with somebody with a specific profile demographic, users also tend to affect people with the same profile demographic within the wider user network. Psychographic segmentation in social media can be developed by perceptions, collected directly or indirectly, about what users are interested in and how they behave as a result. In relation to their interests, a short list of pages in reference to Facebook, or on corporate profiles followed on Twitter, is an important source. If a person is quite interested in extreme sports pages, and presents themselves as a sportsperson, it is likely that they will have behavioral characteristics associated with this area. Psychographic information based on interests, in general, is much simpler and easily collected from social media. The act of following profiles, pages or blogs, and especially sharing and suggesting posts, news and terests. These interests are particularly relevant as they reveal how the user wants to be portrayed to the imagined public, their friends, colleagues and others. Social media focused on mobile devices, such as Twitter and Instagram, bring opportunities for instantaneous analysis of segments. One of the first mottos of Twitter was simply to state what you were doing, allowing the user to share their activities with others. Applications like Instagram still allow users to identify with views and cameras, uniting activities and interests. Social media continues to offer a lot of relevant information about us in a digital atmosphere. The level of activity on the internet is one of the ways of segmenting a profile relating to the behavior of the user on social networks. From the least active users to the most active users, Peter Brandtzaeg and Jan Heim4 propose the following categorization:  Sporadics: those users who use media sporadically, generally avoiding frequent access or newcomers to the market.  Lurkers: the most frequent user of social networks. Those users that read, consume and watch
  • 8.  Socialisers: Those users who focus on social aspects. Not necessarily producing a lot of original content, but share and converse with their contacts.  Debators: Is the category closest to bloggers, activists and for those who are interested in discussing and presenting their own ideas and points of view.  Active Users: these are the most active users contributing a lot of content and heavy users of social networks. To understand the characteristics of audiences in accordance with their level of activity is essential. The profile of a consumer of determined types of products can vary a lot. For example, faithful devotees of some smart phone brands tend to be Active Users, whereas consumers of life insurance, beyond being a more advanced age-group (still an indicator of less frequent activity on social media) have fewer reasons to act spontaneously with pages or profiles to do with security. in relation to brands and the way in which they interact with adverts. This can also be divided into public segments and classification as highlighted below:  Brandlovers: consumers who love the brand and are not afraid to express it. They are always indicating this to their friends and network.  Brand Advocate: consumers who defend a brand whenever they can or in situations of consumption.  Interactors: Part of the public that, even though they may not necessarily be a consumer, interact  message, but are not interesting in making a point or interacting.  Unsatisfied: consumers who interact when a problem occurs and use social media, in a public way, to resolve it.  Brand destroyers: due to the unresolved dissatisfaction or prolonged problem with a brand or product, the brand destroyers are the consumers that feel offended and join to retaliate.  Trolls: people who, even without a specific motive, want to damage a brand, most often for no reason. Social media also shows the links between people. A whole market of relations and influences was created this way. Blogging networks or advertising platforms return to social media to explore this aspect. So, the idea of influence is one of the core values in social media and also can be seen as a way of segmenting the public into different layers. Indexes of influences based on algorithms, despite not being as precise as in-depth human study, are quick and useful. Brand Care, for example, allows user classification in accordance with Klo bigger the power to broadcast a message a user has. It also allows agencies to first listen to what influential consumers are saying, creating the possibility for both positive repercussions as well as the avoidance of spreading crises. The Top Profiles resource allows to discover which twitter users are most influential in each country, State or City through the Klout metrics.
  • 9. APPLYING SEGMENTATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA Report of Public Profiles in Social Media A first application of the public segmentation in social media is to discover or design segments of the public in accordance with its business. It is recommended to develop these reports with a large quantity of data coming from monitoring, relationship and marketing tools of the company. The report can be updated bi-annually to identify how consumers have changed. For example: o Its hotel network possesses different traveller profiles. The autonomous business traveller, the business traveller, the married traveller, the family traveller. What are their worries? How do they search for and publish information in social media? o Is it a company with physical and electronic shops? Are the clients of one type different from the other? Use social media, crossing data from your CRM with the monitoring of social media to discover differences. o What do the 40 thousands followers of your brand of sparkling wines look like? Are they just consumers? What is the gender distribution? How many are cosmetic bloggers? How many are drinks distributors alert to the market's novelties? How are you able to communicate with each and every one of them? Voter against Non-Voter in Political Campaigns In Brazilian political campaigns, we are talking principally of personal brands. Confidence of the Brazilian voter in a specific politician is the most decisive factor when it comes to casting the vote. In a country such as Brazil with a vibrant political discourse, citizens, militants and communicators share opinions about politicians and candidates across the whole country, especially if they are involved in questions of popular interest. However when elections for Governments of States, Towns, Legislative Assemblies and Chamber of Councillors are running, the geographic segment is decisive. o What do users say when they comment on the political blogs of the city and its candidate? Which are the implicit interests that point to the concerns of the electorate? o Of the spontaneous militants, how much are in the electoral sphere of its candidate? What are its characteristics compared to militants of other states? o What is the online journalistic coverage difference between local papers and national papers about the candidate? o Who are the detractors of the brand? Are they from other cities or states? Public in the Social Media x Target Audience of the Brand Not everyone is on social media and not everyone that is on social media is the target audience of the brand. However, are the people that are connecting and conversing with the brand those in the target audience or BrandCare allows you to check out which were the users that most mentioned the searched terms and/or most interacted in the properties of the brand.
  • 10. are they different? It is possible to make this comparison to generate various types of insight: o Prove that your media campaign produced results by bringing people from the target audience of the brand to converse with the company; o Carry out a public profile analysis focused just on the public of the social media that plays a part in the target audience of the products. Develop an engagement action plan that favours this slice of the public. Lawyers versus Detractors of the Brand Remember those customers that complain ten times more when the product of your company is delayed. Can a demographic or psychographic characteristic explain this? Looking more closely at the similarities and differences in each one of these categories can shed light on the conversational tactics in order to promote positive mentions and reduce negative mentions. o What is the profile of activities and interests of your client? Do they recognize and are they used to new technologies? A technological solution such as an app for a Smartphone could improve the sales process? o What do users that complain more emphatically about a hotel network have in common? Measuring opinions and attitudes in comments Very frequently posts on pages on Facebook or user blogs become a space for debate amongst users about their preferences for a particular product, methods of use, political positions and other behaviours. Observing these interactions is an important starting point for further questions. o The public of the different brands of drinks of the conglomerate interacts in a playful way with messages about the relationships between men and women. What are the different cultural positions of this public consumer in relation to relationships and sex? o What are the opinions of different segments of the public in relation to male waxing? To survey online communities such as Facebook groups and forums concerning beauty can help in the launching of a campaign linked to this behaviour, although it is a controversial topic in some societies. The global market for public segmentation is huge and the market will constantly offer more opportunities for seeing the way in which consumers participate in social media. The monitoring of data and conversations on such a global scale presents the greatest challenge to use from an intelligence and overview perspective.
  • 11. s . GET TO KNOW BrandCare is an online social media monitoring software which uses keywords in order to collect relevant messages from networks and analyze them. We attend to agencies, companies, politicians and consultancy firms that wish to explore the force of social media for: communications with consumers and voters, to avoid and manage crises, to deeply understand the public through studies, benchmarks and surveys.  Monitoring of Social Media and sources of data: Blogs, Facebook (Mentions), Facebook Pages, Forums, Google+, Instagram, News, Orkut, Twitter, Videos and Yahoo  Tools for analysis of feeling and categorisation of collected mentions  Communication and interactions with users on Facebook and Twitter  Keyword alerts for the prevention of crises and using of opportunities  Advance and interactive geo-localisation resources in countries, states and cities  Intelligent organisation of searches and results in searches, keywords and topic matters  Differential in the cost-benefit in order to monitor feeds, Twitter profiles, fan pages and blogs for surveys, advanced studies  Top Profiles resource which allows, with a growing database of millions of profiles, to research the most influential Twitter users of each Country,State or City  Automatic generation of reports in diverse formats (PDF, Word, Excel) with the data and analysis carried out. 1 BANNON, Declan P. Marketing Segmentation and Political Marketing. Political Studies Association, 2004. 2 Novo Critério de Classificação Econômica Brasil http://www.abep.org/novo/Content.aspx?ContentID=882 3 The Concept and Application of Life Style Segmentation Joseph T. Plummer http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1250164?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103372248033 4 A Typology of Social Networking Sites Users http://www.academia.edu/906922/A_Typology_of_Social_Networking_Sites_Users www Get to know more about Brand Care on our website. qTo get in direct contact with us, just call 02 8034 9087 RCheck out more content and our social media through the blog Social Figures.