How To Find Your Audience on Instagram

In order to find success on Instagram, you need to find your audience. Otherwise, it’s hard to do well on this social network, even if you post quality content every day. Your audience dictates everything you do on Instagram, right from your content strategy to the engagement you receive. So, if you want to know how to find your audience on Instagram, this guide is for you.

Keep reading to learn what you should do to make sure the right people see your content on Instagram.

How To Find Your Target Audience on Instagram

Before diving into this topic, let’s reiterate what a target audience is on Instagram. Basically, your target audience refers to the people you want to reach with your content. Think of these users as people who will enjoy what you post.

Now that this is out of the way, let’s focus on the main topic, i.e., finding your target audience. Here are nine strategies to find out who to target on Instagram.

Build Detailed Buyer Personas

The first step to finding your audience is creating detailed buyer personas, i.e., a description of your ideal customer. To build one, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• What are you selling, promoting, or doing on Instagram?
• Who is the product, service, or content for?
• What are the interests and hobbies of those you’re targeting?
• What pain points, i.e., challenges, do they face, and how can you help them?
• What values are important to your audience?

Essentially, the more questions you ask, the more information you’ll get about the hypothetical customer. Don’t just stop here; you can do more to flesh out the buyer persona. You can give this individual a name, a job title, and a background story. 

How will this help? Well, buyer personas help shape what you need to do on Instagram. For instance, you’re selling vintage soccer jerseys. This is what your buyer persona will be:

• The person is an avid soccer fan and has been following the sport for several years.
• The person is looking for specific vintage jerseys because they’re hard to get.
• The person has disposable income because vintage jerseys are expensive.
• The person is a fan of a particular soccer club.

Analyze Existing Demographic Data

If you’re already posting on Instagram, you might as well look at existing data to understand who you’re reaching. This gives you insights about who finds your content interesting. 

Here’s how you can get this data:

Note: You need a Business or Creator account to access the Insights page.

1. Open the Instagram mobile app.
2. Tap your profile photo icon. The button is at the bottom right corner of your screen.
3. Tap the hamburger icon, i.e., three horizontal lines, on the top right corner.
4. Select Insights in the Settings and Activity page.

You can view data for views, interactions, new followers, and content you shared. Tap each metric to see a breakdown of your audience. It’ll show the percentage of followers to non-followers, age, location, gender, and more. 

This data will give you an idea of whether your content is attracting the right people. You’ll need to rethink your strategy if it doesn’t align with your buyer persona. 

Monitor Conversations Through Social Listening

Social listening is basically keeping an eye on conversations about you or your products and services. You can learn a lot through this technique. For instance, you’ll know about your audience’s interests in you. It can also show what people really think about you and what problems they’re facing.

There are several ways to do this. For starters, open every notification where a user mentions you. But this may not always happen. At times, they may not use the ‘@’ to tag you on Instagram. They may include your name, brand, or product name in the post.

You can even use social listening to understand what your audience is talking about in your industry.

Use Instagram Polls To Gather Insights

Sometimes, it’s better to ask your current audience specific questions. You can run a poll in your story or post and see how people react. You can post two types of content as a carousel and ask your followers which one they like. 

Let’s use the previous example — you’re running an Instagram page that sells vintage soccer jerseys. One post can be two images of different soccer clubs. In the caption, you ask your followers which club’s jerseys you should post next. This helps you pick the next post for your Instagram page.

What if no one participates in the poll? In this case, you can assume people don’t find your poll or content interesting. Either way, there’s always something to learn from your audience, even when they remain silent.

Use Relevant Hashtags Strategically

Hashtags can push your content to the right audience. But, this doesn’t mean you go overboard and stuff your caption with hashtags. Rather, you need to use relevant hashtags. Ideally, you don’t want to use more than 2 – 3 hashtags per post.

How do you know what phrases to use in your captions? Well, you can always see what everyone in your niche is doing and use that as inspiration. Another solution is to use third-party tools like Hootsuite or Ahrefs.

Think of hashtags as a folder on your computer. The right hashtag puts your content in a relevant folder, making it easier for people to find your posts.

Ideally, you want to use what’s trending, which is important. However, you should also include hashtags that are relevant to your niche. Try to find a balance between the two, i.e., use a combination of trending and niche hashtags.

If you have a branded hashtag, add it in your captions. You can even ask your followers to use this hashtag in their posts.

Use Geotagging To Reach Local Audiences

To reach a local audience, you need to use geotagging. In other words, add a location to your post before you publish it on Instagram. This, like hashtags, increases your content’s discoverability. 

People searching for an event or a location on Instagram are more likely to come across your posts. For example, if you have a stall near the MetLife Stadium, add this as the location in your promotional post.

Collaborate With Influencers in Your Niche

Influencers are the best way to reach the target audience in your niche. Since these public figures already have the trust of their followers, you can make the most of this collaboration. 

A common mistake is to only look at the follower count. Why is this a mistake? This metric doesn’t give the complete picture of the influencer’s capabilities. You know how large their following is, but how many users engage with their content? Sometimes, people can have large audiences, but low engagement rates. 

Use our Instagram Engagement Calculator to monitor an influencer’s performance on this social media platform.

Now, you want to make the collaboration authentic. Otherwise, the influencer’s audience may not enjoy the content, driving them away from your profile. Here are some things you can do with influencers:

• Ask them to take over your Instagram account for a day
• Review your brand, product, or service
• Request them to share your content
• Include your product or service in one of their posts

Once you find the right influencer, what you do next is up to you. One option is to give the influencer complete creative control so the sponsored post doesn’t feel out of place. You can always provide guidelines that they need to follow. However, avoid setting too many restrictions because it can make the content look and feel inauthentic. Trust us; this is something you want to avoid at all costs.

Engage Actively in Conversations

Instagram, like other platforms, is all about being social. You want to engage with people on this platform. Now, this doesn’t mean you jump into every conversation. Not only will your audience find this inauthentic, but they may even block or unfollow you.

So, what should you do to engage with your audience? This may seem obvious, but whenever someone sends a direct message (DM), make it a point to respond. If a user comments on your post, take your time to reply.

Our Instagram Like Bot can help you with various engagement-related tasks.

When you’re using social listening, you will come across posts and comments about you. If relevant, it’s a good idea to join the conversation. Now, don’t leave a generic reply because that will never work. You need to be thoughtful and add value to the conversation.

Create Content That Resonates With Your Target Audience

This is pretty obvious, right? After all, you’re on Instagram because you want to create content your target audience loves. But not every post will hit the mark. How do you know what your audience likes?

The answer lies in your Insights page. If you notice good engagement and reach, people are enjoying your content. In this situation, they’re giving you the green light to continue doing more of the same.

If your metrics are going down, well, you need to change what you’re doing. You can never go wrong if you provide valuable content to your audience. Again, let’s use the previous example, i.e., you’re running a vintage soccer jersey store.

One of your posts can talk about what people should look for when buying vintage soccer jerseys. You can explain how to identify original jerseys from first copies or fakes. 

Don’t just stick to one format. Be open to experimenting on Instagram, especially when the platform releases new features. 

Can You Change Audience on Instagram Post After Posting?

No, you cannot change your audience on an Instagram post after posting your content. Once you publish the content, the platform’s algorithm controls who will see your post. So, how to change audience on Instagram post?

Well, Instagram allows you to edit the following elements of your post:

• Collaborators
• Location
• Mentions
• Caption
• AI label
• Alt text

But it doesn’t let you change anything else. So, what are your options? One solution is to delete and repost the post after making the necessary changes. This may or may not work, depending on your audience.

The other solution is to note your mistakes, learn from them, and never repeat them. You can also give yourself a five-minute buffer after adding finishing touches to your draft. This gives you enough time to review the content and make sure everything looks good.

How To Target Competitors’ Audience on Instagram

How do you target your competitors’ audience on Instagram? No matter where you look, you can’t find an option that lets you do this. 

The truth is, you need to get creative. Here’s how to target competitors’ audience on Instagram.

1. Use Meta Ad Library

Using the Meta Ad Library is the easiest way to see what your competitors are doing. It contains all the ads people are running on various Meta-owned platforms. You can filter your search to show only Instagram ads.

It shows when the ads launched, their captions, and the images and videos in the promotional content. You can filter the ads by keywords so you know what to include in your marketing messages.

2. Engage With Your Competitors’ Followers

Social listening techniques can help you learn more about your competitors’ followers. For example, search for posts that mention your competitor. Did they respond to the post? You can convince their audience to check out your profile if the answer is no.

Leave a relevant and genuine reply to their post. You don’t want to be evident because it will get your competitor’s attention. Plus, their audience may become cautious and stay away from your profile. Or, you can see who’s following them and see if there’s any relevant post you can engage with. 

3. Address the Pain Points of Your Competitors’ Audience

While analyzing your competitors’ audience, you’ll understand their pain points. If your competitor isn’t addressing them, this is your chance to win them over. Create content that directly addresses their audience’s pain points. You want to show them that you’re paying attention and you care about their issues. 

How To See When Your Instagram Audience Is Most Active

How is this relevant to finding your audience on Instagram? If you post when your audience is online, they’re more likely to see your content in their feeds. 

But, before you do this, make sure you have a business or creator account. Here’s how to see when Instagram audience is most active:

1. Open the Instagram app and go to your profile page.
2. Tap the hamburger button and open the Insights tab.
3. Select New Followers and scroll down until you see the Most Active Times section. 

This section shows when your audience is active throughout the day. Instagram lets you change the days and the date range.

If it’s still difficult to find your audience, Plixi can always help you. With our organic AI-powered growth engine, we can make sure the right people see your content. We can help grow your follower count and engagement, so every post you publish gains traction in the future. Join today so you can achieve your Instagram goals!

FAQs

Is there something you want to know about finding your Instagram audience? Feel free to check out this section.