By Nick Taylor

Twitter users love the platform because it’s the best place to find people with common interests from all over the world. This makes it a great place to build and foster a community.

Twitter is also ‘what’s happening’. It’s where people go to follow the latest stories and events. This makes it a great place to engage your audience when they’re most receptive.

But as well as offering marketers a great platform on which to reach consumers, Twitter has data that can inform marketing strategies on the platform itself and beyond.

Because Twitter data is detailed and public it is invaluable to our customers who need to build a better understanding of their consumers using tools like Brandwatch Audiences. Even those in industries that might not expect a lot of direct engagement there can use insights from Twitter to better reach their target audiences online and offline.

Building a meaningful marketing persona is hard work. Focus groups and market research are expensive undertakings, and often they take so long they’re out of date by the time anyone gets to look at them.

Twitter data is a fantastic, real-time source of public opinion on pretty much anything, but there are millions of tweets sent every day. How do you know where to start looking?

Here’s a simple five-minute guide for which audiences you should be identifying, how to define them, what you can discover from them, and what to do next.

Brandwatch Audiences

Brandwatch Audiences is an influencer and audience analytics platform that helps marketers identify and reach the right people.

Powered by the full fidelity Twitter API, it allows users to study all the public tweets of any group of people in real-time.

What makes Brandwatch Audiences especially useful for building meaningful personas and marketing strategies is that it can benchmark any insights against the whole of Twitter. This is critical when trying to cut through the noise to see not only what your target audience is talking about the most but also what they talk about more than anyone else.

To learn more about Brandwatch, check out their profile on partners.twitter.com.