Table of Contents
This is my review of Audiense, previously known as SocialBro. I was provided with a free press version to try the tool.
Note: Updated January 2023.
In this review, I’ll talk about:
- What is Audiense
- What Audiense does
- The Audiense Manager
- The Targeting Pack
- Who is Audiense for
What is Audiense?
Audiense is a consumer insight and segmentation tool that helps businesses execute successful marketing campaigns.
With a few clicks with Audience Connect you can measure your – or anyone else’s – Twitter audience and monitor their social media marketing efforts. Audiense Insights focuses on insights about any audiences you want.
Companies may use this method to collect specific social media data for effective social marketing campaigns. The bulk of the extra features are linked to ROI monitoring and online ads.
In order words, it enables you to understand how audiences follow, engage and react towards a brand or an influencer.
The Audience Manager
Not only that, it also allows you to compile an audience on Twitter into a personalised group of users according to pre-defined criteria, that you can use for your marketing campaigns.
This means that with Audiense you can accomplish several research tasks within minutes and uncover new opportunities:
- Find segments for an audience following a certain brand or influencer
- Target specific group of people that are influenced by specific brands or people
- Launch new products for a specific new audience, based on insights and segments
- Provide the tools to better connect to your target audience by understanding their behaviour
The list is longer than that, Audiense can perform more tasks so I would recommend trying the software for free.
What Audiense does
Some of the tasks you can accomplish
Audiense comes really handy when you have to know more about your target audience, if you are in marketing it’s a must to have.
Learn about your Audience
Audiense reveals data and analytics about your social audience. You can uncover segments, sub-audiences and other data to learn about who is following you.
Build an audience
The tool enables you to build a customised audience for Twitter users. The Audience Connect dashboard provides data about a community in the form of panels and widgets, so it’s interactive.
Segment an audience
Take an account on Twitter and Audiense gives you a lot of information about the followers, according to a wide choice of criteria: from job roles, to interests, gender and specific keywords, just to mention a few. You can also segment audiences based on conversation, behaviours, connexions…
A detailed look at the features
Audience Insights is probably the most impressive tool from Audiense, let’s have a closer look at it.
The audience insight is segmenting your audience for a given Twitter account for an insights boost. In the screenshot above, I have taken as an example the account of Dare Agency in London and the data tells you that there are 5 main segments, the largest one being ‘Strategist, idea’.
The cool thing about segmentation is that you can find out who they are in terms of interests, jobs titles and other demographic data.
For example, in our case, the segment “production, film” is not the audience we are looking for. We don’t want this type of audience, and the tool is helping us understand this.
From here, we can make a strategic decision to have less of a “film, production” audience and focus our efforts to build other segments like “strategist, ideas”.
The graph is also interactive and when you click on any of those 5 segments, you’ll get a dashboard with extra information about that segment.
The dashboard consists of 9 parts:
- Demographic – information about gender, Location (city and country), language bio and age
Do you want to know which job bio they added on the social accounts? Audiense got you covered:
The report is filtered by the most popular job title from your audience and in my test the title “Creative” is the most popular, which makes sense because our agency is a creative agency.
But at Dare, we also offer digital marketing services and design, so that’s why these other three job roles are also very popular.
The demographic report also gives info about the age of my audience, which surprisingly is very young (18-24).
What I also really liked is that for each box of information on demographic, Audiense provides you with actionable recommendations.
For example, I wanted to know what can I do with the “age” information, Audiense provided me with this:
Interpretation
The graph can be interpreted quantitatively to see the weight of the different age ranges within the segment or audience, or compare the data to the baseline to uncover the most relevant in this audience. Use comparisons to the baseline to find the most relevant age ranges to the segment or audience you are analyzing.
Example of use
Age distribution can influence a range of decisions, from tactical aspects such as creatives tone of voice to more strategic ones such as the contents and campaigns segmentation and targeting.
I found this really cool. Note that this information cannot be personalised as the audience is not a static monolithic.
For example, “city” and “country” show exactly the same recommendations.
It’s not a huge deal, but if you were expecting some actionable insights to understand differences between city and country, you would probably think they are the same type of targeting and wouldn’t focus on granular targeting such as a city.
I think if Audiense could provide more actionable insights on why to target a city or a country and why it’s different and important to do so, it would be probably a piece of information that I would find more valuable.
- Socioeconomics. In which industry are they employed and which education do they have? Audiense provides you with this info:
Socioeconomics can be used to learn more about level of education, role in the company and status, whether they are married, single, engaged, complicated or in a relationship.
This info box didn’t have the same recommendations as the previous one, so if I wanted to know how to use these insights, I would have nothing to guide me.
Also, something that I missed was the household income and because I live in the UK and not in the US, I don’t have access to this type of information. This is because Facebook doesn’t provide this information outside the US.
It’s not a big deal, but if you want to target only a certain segment of people earning a certain amount of money in the UK, you wouldn’t be able to find them on Audiense.
3. Influencers and brands – you find info about who and what influences them
4. Interests – tourist destination, finance, business, news, careers and more than 20 other interest segments
5. Media affinity – expressed in percentage, you’ll find a list of media outlets that these people follow, interact or engage
6. Which hashtags do they use? What online publications do they follow?
Here we go:
7. Do you want to know what personality they have? Here we go:
8. Which elements influence their purchasing decision-making process? Audiense got you covered.
9. Online habits: what is the amount of time spent online on various devices or apps like WhatsApp, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Linked In and many more.
Essentially, based on the results, your target audience that frequently follows the account @thisisdare on Twitter, in the United Kingdom, also follows Rethink, a creative agency in Canada, is interested in travels (48%) and finance (46%), watches CBS (11%) and ESPN (10%), buys from famous brands (50%) and trust friends and family (36%) advise when it comes to deciding what to buy.
They also spend time on YouTube (1.41x), WhatsApp (1.30x) and Pinterest (1.21x).
If I was new to this audience, it would take me weeks and many surveys to find out this information.
How can you use this data?
As you can see, the potential of this data is enormous and exciting at the same time. It allows you to craft the perfect marketing, PR or ads campaign online because you know what makes them buy and who influences this community of people.
Here are a few examples:
- know what makes them buy
- Learn who they buy from, influencers, brands, or both
- Use personality traits to create customised communication messages
- Know how to price your products because you know their socio economics
- Learn from a competitor’s Twitter community what makes them buy your products
- Start relationships with influencers for partnerships and affiliations
These are just some of the use cases for Audiense. There are many more, so open an account to find out.
Again, if I was new to this industry, this research would take me a huge amount of time and considerable budget, provided I knew how to do it in the first place.
Audience Members
Do you want to get to know every single member of your audience? Audiense got you covered.
Another function that I have tested was the Audience Members.
Members view allows you to proof check the people following an account, so you can quickly check whether they are real or fake.
You can check social links for extra validation:
You have basically all social accounts available that these people have an account with:
- YouTube
When the icon is greyed out, it means they don’t have an account active with that particular social network.
The Targeting Pack
One of the most exciting features I found on Audiense is the Targeting Pack, essentially a download of your target audience that you can upload to any other advertising platform.
“In the targeting pack, you are downloading the best criteria that you can plug into advertising platforms to reach this audience.”
Roisin Mcmanara – Audiense.com
To find it, click on the Actions tab and then Download Targeting Pack.
Audiense will send you the Excel file straight into your email.
The targeting pack downloads the audience that you have selected. You want to select only one segment? You can download it.
Let’s see what’s inside the file.
So, you get a file like this one with a description of who is following you.
The Targeting Pack is very useful. It’s packed in different tabs that are ready to plug into a tool:
Cities: you can upload the cities in Google Ads for example, because you know where your audience live!
Facebook and Instagram profiles: This is a list of unique pages/accounts that your audience has an affinity for. You can input this as part of targeting in Facebook’s audience manager!
Twitter profiles: connect Audiences via Twitter Tailored Audiences and use lookalikes to expand reach if necessary.
YouTube: Using Google ads manager you can create YouTube ads to appear associated with certain YouTube pages.
Google Ads and DSPs: You may use Google Ads or DSP to target visitors to specific pages by entering placements or URLs. Indeed, Google Ads allows you to copy and paste a vast number of URLs so that they can be matched to an addressable audience through Google Ads. Simply copy and paste hundreds of appropriate websites from the targeting pack as feedback for your Google Ads Network show campaigns.
This report is very actionable, focuses on profiles that you can download and upload in a matter of minutes.
The bottom line: my Audiense review
Is Audiense worth it?
It’s a tough question to answer.
The thing is: Audiense is not for everybody.
I would recommend Audiense if:
- You are a social media marketer and need data about Twitter profiles to make market research;
- You are a Community Manager and need to manage, increase and engage the social community of your brand;
- You run an agency and help clients to launch new products and services on social media;
- You want to work with influencers and need to find out who they are and how many followers they have.
