Social Media Cohort Profile

No matter what your business is, digital marketing—and social media marketing specifically—is where you can create growth and find new audiences. Some companies hold back on social media because they think it reaches only millennials. Well, it does reach millennials, but it also reaches every cohort except the very young, the blind, and the dead.

Facebook is a major player in social media and a behemoth in digital marketing. I believe it is the most powerful channel in the marketing silo because of the cohorts that use it on a regular basis. I know Gen Z and the younger members of the millennials prefer Instagram and Snapchat, but they still engage with Facebook, and of course you can cross-market Facebook and Instagram from a Facebook business dashboard.

Facebook advertising is possibly the best channel to engage your market using social media. You can reach the entire market or you can segment it down to age, behavior, and demographics. Facebook advertising allows marketers to reach a larger audience by creating look-alike audiences. But maybe the most attractive feature is reaching users with the most up-to-date contact information and using a relevant CTA, getting them to click through to a landing page where you can collect their current contact information.

Here’s a breakdown of users on Facebook. As of 2016, there were 1.74 billion.

The percentages are impressive, but when you calculate the actual numbers, it’s mind-blowing. The smallest cohort is 10.6%, which calculates to 164.15 million. That’s worldwide, of course, but I’m making the point that 10.6% of Facebook users is HUGE, and Facebook and social media in general will let you segment your advertising to any and all groups.

There are 234 million active Facebook users in North America. I’m trying to paint a picture, but the canvas is huge.

Early on, Facebook marketing was all about likes and people seeing your content. That was basically the same model as most of the other sites had, except Twitter and LinkedIn. With the introduction of Facebook Live and Facebook Ads, the landscape has changed fundamentally.

I use Facebook as an example, but Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and others have huge numbers of users. All the social sites are looking for businesses to advertise with them. They all have different models, but the models all include budgeting how much you are willing to invest in campaigns. So it makes it available to all budgets. I started my career in direct marketing, mainly direct mail. It was the best channel to personalize the message and segment the universe. But with the growth of digital marketing, marketer’s direct-marketing budgets started shifting to social media and reduced direct mail and print by a large percentage. Digital marketing offers diverse models to reach your market deeper and cheaper, and with more personalization than any other channel.

Social media can be used for brand awareness, engagement, and lead generation. Best of all, your market is definitely there, and the segmentation allows for very personalized content. You can even upload your own data and reach segments that engage on social media.

The following is a snapshot of Instagram’s users.