Audience research
You cannot write for people you have not read
Audience research on social is reading what your buyers already write in public, in their own words, to learn the problems, vocabulary, and objections you should be addressing.
Everyone agrees you should know your audience and almost nobody does the reading. It is unglamorous: an afternoon spent scrolling through posts by people you will never speak to, writing down phrases. It is also the single cheapest input to better copy, better keywords, and a better product, and social is the only place where thousands of your buyers have already written it all down unprompted.
Copy their words exactly
The point is not to summarise what they mean. It is to keep the literal phrasing, including the clumsy bits, because the phrase a buyer uses is the phrase they will search, recognise, and respond to. A paraphrase in your own vocabulary throws away the only thing that made the research worth doing.
Read the middle, not the top
The most followed accounts in any market are performing for an audience of peers. The person with four hundred followers describing an actual Tuesday problem is a truer sample, and there are far more of them. Sample down the follower curve deliberately or you will end up writing for commentators.
Objections are more useful than desires
What people say they want is aspirational and mostly identical across a market. What they say is stopping them is specific, and it is the thing your copy has to answer. A list of the top five reasons people do not buy is worth more than a persona document.
Research decays
A market vocabulary shifts every year or so, faster in a hot category. Research from two years ago describes a market that has since renamed its own problem. Redo the reading annually and you will notice the drift before your copy starts sounding dated.
How to do it
Define the sample by situation
Not by job title alone. A head of ops at a company with fifteen people has a different problem from one at a company with fifteen hundred, and job title alone will merge them.
Read fifty posts and record verbatim
Keep a document of literal quotes grouped as problems, objections, and vocabulary. Fifty is enough to see the repeats and small enough to finish in an afternoon.
Count the repeats
A phrase that appears once is a person. A phrase that appears eight times across different accounts is a market. Only the repeats belong in copy.
Write the objection list
Turn the recurring reasons not to buy into a numbered list, and check every page you own against it. Most pages answer objection one and ignore two through five.
Feed it into your terms and your writing
The verbatim phrases become your keyword list, and the objections become the things your replies and posts answer.
Common mistakes
- Sampling only the biggest accounts, who are performing rather than describing.
- Paraphrasing quotes into your own vocabulary and losing the phrasing that made them useful.
- Building a persona document with a stock photo and an invented name instead of a list of real sentences.
- Doing the research once and never revisiting it as the market renames its problems.
How Quillen handles audience research
Quillen builds a persona from your own writing rather than from an audience description, so it solves the other half of the problem: sounding like yourself. Audience research is still your job, and it is what makes your keywords and your ideal customer profile any good, both of which Quillen consumes directly. The persona is stored as a SOUL.md and includes an antivocabulary of words you would never use, which is where research about your audience vocabulary practically lands.
Common questions
- How many posts do I need to read?
- Around fifty from different accounts is usually enough to see the repeats. The value comes from repetition across people, so twenty posts from four accounts is worse than one post each from twenty accounts.
- Is social research a substitute for talking to customers?
- No, it is a complement with a different bias. Social shows you what people say in public to peers; a call shows you what they say to a vendor. Both are performances, and the gap between them is informative.
- What do I do with the research once I have it?
- Three things: the verbatim phrases become keywords, the objections become copy, and the situations become your ideal customer profile. If it does not become one of those, you collected it for nothing.