You Ask, I Answer: Finding Social Media Groups for Specific Audiences?

In today's episode, Linda asks, other than a standard search operation to identify groups, how does anyone know of a more efficient way to find groups geared towards a specific audience? Um well, yeah, so there's there's two ways to do this that are uh impactful. There's lots of ways in general, but impactfully. Uh first, with search, chances are the group that you're looking for, the groups that you're looking for, uh, are not necessarily going to be named after the audience they're in. So, for example, I'm in a uh a a sp a public speaking group is does not have the word public speaker anywhere in the in the group's name.

Um I'm in a uh marketing group that has does have marketing anywhere in its name. Anytime you're searching for a group of people, as long as you know that group of people well, the way you want to try and find those people is with uh jargon. So with Jargon in particular, there are words and phrases that are unique to that group of people. Every group of people does this. Every uh you know every collection of people has some sort of language that m is exclusive to that group that others outside that group just inherently don't use.

I used to work in um financial aid and and the student loan industry, and one of the terms that came up all the time was the FAFSA, the free application for federal student aid. You don't use this term outside of a very specific context, right? Um, and that was uh people talking about financial aid, about applying for that uh financial aid using that form every year. So you could tell who was looking for that based on the use of that term. With if you were targeting financial aid professionals, the people who work in institutions, uh, there is the national Student Loan Database System uh uh NSLDS.

Again, this is not a term you're gonna hear anywhere outside of the offices of financial aid uh professionals because nobody else knows about it. Um and so having knowledge of these systems means that uh or these specific jargony terms means that you can very quickly identify um people and groups that are talking about this thing. So when you're searching for groups, make sure that you're using jargon instead of uh the the demographic name. You will find some groups by demographic name, but the ones where people are really talking about the specific thing you care about, uh you'll use jargon. And the nice thing about that is that you'll be able to sub segment that group.

So let's take, for example, uh Latino, uh the Latinx community. There are different terms people use depending on uh which sub segment of that group you're talking about. There's uh a very dis there's a very big difference culturally between people say of Cuban descent and people of Mexican descent. It's just how those people separate themselves in their communities. Um do not reference uh Korean dishes by their Japanese name.

It will just not be not be welcome. Um and so knowing those terms, knowing the the the specific pieces of language will really help you understand um how to find those groups, how to find those groups and how to find those specific things that uh people want. And if there's a language difference in terms of like the the the spoken language, the uh like for example the Korean language, um, that helps you sub segment even further because there's gonna be a big difference between a a Korean group that focuses on music uh and a Korean group that focuses on food, right? Again, more language. Every every human being has that want to belong to something, and knowing that and being able to leverage that is how you're gonna take advantage of uh search functions in these tools to identify just that specific group you're looking for.

Now the second way to find groups is blindingly obvious, which is if you have access to members of that community now already and you're trying to get more of them, ask the people you know, hey, what groups do you hang out in online? Yeah, what groups do you have uh access to? Where where do you spend your time? Right, and you can do that in focus groups, you can do that in one-on-one interviews, you can do that in a survey, uh, but ask people, ask where they hang out, what groups specifically do they spend time with. And if you are working on a specific platform, even ask them that hey, what Facebook groups are you in, what LinkedIn groups are you in, what Slack communities, what Discord communities.

But the thing that will get you the the real juice is is that jargon search, right? You have to know the audience, you have to be able to ask the audience, and you may need to do a focus group uh or some market research uh on the demographic as a whole first, so that um you can develop the language. Uh, there are a number of really good text mining tools that can do this, um, but you want to understand the words people use within their group and specifically the words that are uncommon, right? So in the world of financial aid, there's a lot of talk, you know, loan and student loan, even student loan is a pretty broad term, and a whole lot of people use that term. If you talk about like a Pell Grant, um, or you talk about uh subsidized versus unsubsidized staffer loans.

Now you're getting into the the unique terms that were only going to occur in that particular context. So spend some time with doing focus groups or market research first. The way to get to that would be to use uh ideally something like Reddit or social media monitoring tool like TalkWalker to parse out the the bigger groups and their language, and then once you've got that language identified, then you can start sub-segmenting down uh into the smaller group. So make sure that you use a good natural language processing tool that will get you uh those jargon terms uh sooner rather than later. Uh and again, you will still need almost certainly need to ask somebody uh for some help at some point, unless you would literally participate and live in one of those communities already, and you can just see the interactions.

I'm in a bunch of Discord servers, and there are terms where I don't have to really do any work, I just listen to what people have to say, and the way that they use the language that describes the group and uh the terms, the issues, even other people they mentioned. There are certain specific people that come up in conversation that yeah, if I stuck that into a search tool, uh would be very easy to find uh what those where else those people talk about those specific people. So that's the answer. Uh well, it's an answer. Um jargon for sp for search functions and focus groups, market research and one on one research for developing and understanding what that jargon is.

Knowing it will make it also a lot easier for you when you go to interact in those groups as well. So make sure that you s really invest the time. It's it's anthropology, uh it's it's ethnography to try and understand how a group functions and what people have to say. So good question. Follow ups uh questions, please leave them in the comments box below.

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