All social marketing channels are not created equal, yet too many marketers treat them as one entity. If you’re marketing on Pinterest the same way you would on Reddit or treating Twitter as identical to Instagram, you’re missing out on one of the most important things a marketer can do: audience segmentation.

Different Channels, Different Markets
Quick – which social media channel has an audience that’s more than 70 percent female? Which one has a mostly male audience? Where are professionals forging new connections? Who’s using Vine? How about Instagram? A little research into the demographics of who’s using different social media channels will tell you volumes about how to reach your audience through them. Once you know who spends the most time on which channels, you have a better idea of your voice on those channels. That doesn’t mean you need to conceal your brand – quite the opposite, in fact – but you should have an idea of the people you’re likely to encounter. This is the beginning of your search for your ideal social media audience.

Site Demographics
The two busiest social media platforms, at least for now, are Facebook and Twitter. These two are the closest to a general audience you’re likely to find. They’re used by a roughly equal proportion of men and women, they appeal to all income levels, and they reach virtually all age groups (and yes, that includes seniors, more than half of whom now use Facebook to stay in touch with family and keep up with friends). When you dig a little deeper, though, differences appear. Pinterest, for example, has far more reach with a female audience; more than 70 percent of Pinterest users are women. Snapchat has captured a young demographic with just over 70 percent of the user base being under 25. Google+ is at the other end of the spectrum with its fastest demographic growth among users between 45 and 54.

Why does this matter so much? If you were selling a new music-sharing app, where would you advertise? How about if you were finding an audience for productivity software for C-level executives? There’s no better or worse demographic, only ones that are more or less relevant as your target audience.

Drill Deeper
Overall site demographics are important, but they don’t tell the whole story. Let’s take a closer look at one of the fastest-growing social media sites, Reddit. Reddit’s almost as male as Pinterest is female with an audience that is about 65 percent male overall, but the channel is heavily divided into sub-groups, some of which are almost exclusively female. Here’s where marketers who do their homework really get the edge over their competition because they look not just at whole forests but at individual stands of trees. These outliers in an otherwise heavily skewed demographic group are a receptive audience for social media marketing because they’re undervalued by a surface-skimming approach.

There’s no such thing as knowing too much about your audience, and that goes for the people you connect with via social media. Discover the demographic profile of the users you’re really reaching when you market on social media, and you’ll have a better idea of how to make your message sing.