When it comes to being successful with your social media marketing efforts, you have to know which social networks your target audience is using. 

If your blog is targeted towards the elderly, the last place you want to try to build a following on is Instagram. Even if you do everything right, you will never get any significant traffic from your efforts.

he foundation of your social media strategy is to first and foremost to learn who your target audience is and why they use social media. To accomplish this, you have to utilize demographics.

Determining Demographics

Your demographics will tell you the who, and include:

• Location 
• Gender
• Age
• Income
• Education level
• Ethnicity
• Marital status
• Religion
• Number of children

Determining your demographics will depend on whether you have a website and traffic already. 

If you don’t have a site yet, you will need to find a website that is similar to your business and use it for your analysis.

In determining demographics, there are a few options. You can use Alexa to help you with figuring out your audience. All you need to do is enter your site or competitors into the search bar, and it will provide you with the information you need.

You can also use Google Adwords Display Planner. With this tool, you just need to enter a keyword that describes your niche into the search bar. 

When you hit the submit button, you’ll get a screen that displays useful age and gender information at the top. 

The final way you can gather demographic information is with Google Analytics. The data is collected from your site and reveals key metrics for both age and gender. 

This data is the best source of information for you because it represents your actual audience.