Social Media Demographics: Reaching the Right Guests with Your Posts
Here’s a tip for planning your social media strategy—spread yourself too thin and your efforts will fall short. Instead, you’ll find better results by selecting a few platforms that target the right demographics for your hotel and focusing your efforts there.
Choosing the platforms where you should focus your time and energy can easily be confirmed with a look at recent social media demographics. Each year it’s a good practice to review data for the top social media platforms to confirm which are the most relevant for your hotel. In turn, these efforts will send more guests your way.
We’ve compiled the latest stats from Pew Research Center, our go-to source for social data. Here are our top takeaways to help you reach the right guests with your content.
Determine Which Sites Your Customers Use
Identifying which social media sites your target customers are hanging out on is the first step to crafting a more effective strategy. Are you looking to reach people in a certain age group or socioeconomic status, couples or families traveling for pleasure or solo business travelers? Keep in mind that you may or may not always find these groups in the same social channel. However, according to Pew Research, Facebook and YouTube are the most widely used social media channels across a range of age groups.
In a survey Pew Research Center conducted in early 2019, seven-in-ten adults say they use Facebook and roughly three-quarters of those users check it daily. The percentage of US adult users has remained unchanged since 2016, making it an ideal place to focus the bulk of your efforts.
On the other hand, YouTube users, which account for 73% of adults, use the site mainly for children’s content, news and to learn new skills through How-To videos. That may not make YouTube the ideal place to locate hotel guests, however, this figure does show that the power of video content remains strong.
Focus on Facebook
If your social media budget is tight, Facebook is the best place for you to reach the largest audience with your content. The site is popular among all demographic groups, although some age groups use it more than others. It’s interesting that 79% of the youngest demographic group, 18 to 29-year-olds, use Facebook, which is much higher those the 46% of users who are 65 and older. However, there has been tremendous growth in older age groups using the platform. Usage has more than doubled since August 2012, when only 20% of Americans who are 65 and older said they used Facebook at all.
Don’t Neglect Young Adults
It’s no surprise that young adults ages 18 to 29 are the most active age group online with 88% indicating that they use any form of social media, compared to 78% of adults 30 to 49 and 64% of adults ages 50 to 64. While not all of your online content should be geared towards this group, it is important to not overlook them.
Young adults’ online habits are reported to be more varied than other age groups and understanding how they use each platform can help you build a stronger plan of attack. For example, Instagram and Snapchat have a large following among young adults, ages 18-24. Snapchat usage is high among 18 to 24-year-olds (78%) but falls to 54% of adults ages 25 to 29.
Another not surprising takeaway about young adults is the amount of time that they spend on social media – more than any other age group. The overall share of responders who use Snapchat and Instagram was lower, but the majority of users visit these platforms on a daily basis. Instagram users who visit the site daily has increased to 60% since 2016 when 51% of Instagram users were daily visitors. Fifty five percent of users report that they visit Instagram several times per day. And while 82% of Snapchat users ages 18 to 24 say they use the platform daily, 71% report that they visit the site multiple times her day. Other social channels such as Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are used by smaller shares of Americans. However, many hotels have used LinkedIn strategically in an attempt to obtain corporate meetings or business traveler bookings.
Prepare A Varied Strategy
There wasn’t one group of social media users that reported sticking to only one platform. In fact, 73% of people use more than one, and at least three, of the eight platforms discussed in the survey. This gives you more options when planning your strategy. While the largest overlap is of Facebook users who also use You Tube it includes other sites, as well. For example, 73% of Twitter users and 77% of Snapchat users also report that they use Instagram. Young adults ages 18 to 29 rule again with the majority of them using four of these platforms. Ideally, you should select the top three sites where your target customer can be found and work exclusively within those.
Staying up to date on the key demographics for the major social media sites will help you confidently target your message to the right audience. Creating posts for each site is an investment of time and money. Make sure that it’s being used wisely.
