Future:Media:Change

How does your target market use social media? The Forrester Consumer Profile Tool tells you.

Effective outreach, marketing, and engagement depend on finding your target audience and communicating with them in a way that resonates with them. How and where you approach retirees, for example, will differ from how and where you approach 20-somethings. Before embarking on your next social networking campaign, then, it makes sense to do a little research into how and where your intended audience uses that medium.

This tool, created with Forrester’s Social Technographics® data, allows you to enter the basic demographics of your target audience — age, gender, country — to find out whether those people tend to be creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, or inactives in their use of social media. The company’s ladder of social engagement defines those identities in this way:

• Creators - “write blogs, or upload video, music, or text”
• Critics - “respond to content from others. They post reviews, comment on blogs, participate in forums, and edit wiki articles”
• Collectors - “organize content for themselves or others using RSS feeds, tags, and voting sites like Digg.com”
• Joiners - “connect in social networks like MySpace and Facebook”
• Spectators - read “social content including blogs, user-generated video, podcasts, forums, or reviews”
• Inactives - “neither create nor consume social content of any kind”

(Forrester defines these identities in greater detail here.)

Use of the tool is free, like a free sample of the company’s far more detailed market data. But even the free version is an excellent tool to begin understanding how your audience uses social media.

We’ve embedded the tool below for your use.