A social audience lets you target individuals based on their social media activity, interests, and professional profiles across platforms like Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch.
Create a social audience by selecting Persona from the left-hand sidebar, clicking into your Audience Library, and selecting the + Audience button. Choose Social as your audience type.
1. Name Your Audience
Enter a Name for the audience.
Click Create to proceed to the audience builder.
2. Using the AI Assistant
The AI Assistant is the fastest way to build a social audience. It discovers relevant social media handles, along with closely related affinities and personality types, based on a natural-language description of your target audience.
Click the AI Assist button in the audience builder.
Describe who you want to target in plain language (e.g., "outdoor enthusiasts who follow REI and Patagonia").
The AI searches for and discovers social media handles across supported platforms: X, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube.
Review the AI-suggested handles. Select or deselect individual results to refine your list.
Alongside handles, the AI surfaces affinities and personality types closely related to the criteria you provided, helping you broaden targeting beyond exact handle matches.
Review the AI-suggested affinities and personality types the same way you review handles, and keep the ones that fit your target.
Confirmed selections are automatically added to your audience.
You can also apply demographic filters after AI discovery to further narrow your targeting.
3. Manual Targeting
You can also build your audience manually using five targeting types:
Social Handles: Search for specific people or brands by their social media handle across X, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube. Handles appear as chips/badges for easy management. This form also includes a Bio Search toggle, which lets you match users by keywords in their bios (e.g., "fitness coach" or "sustainable fashion") instead of specific handles. (NEW)
Employment & B2B: Target by job title or employer using data from social platforms.
Demographics: Narrow your audience by Age Range (18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+), Gender (Male, Female, Unknown), and Location (Countries or other location types). Demographics can only be used in the Filter or Exclude steps, not Include.
Personality Types: Target based on psychological classifications including Big Five Personality Traits and Needs & Values.
Curated Audiences: Browse pre-built audience segments based on interests, brands, media properties, or influencers.
4. Include, Exclude, and Filter
Three operations let you refine your audience:
Include: Adds individuals who match the selected parameters to your audience.
Exclude: Removes individuals who match the selected parameters from your audience.
Filter: Narrows your audience to only those who meet specified criteria.
Note: Filtering by social handles is only available in the manual creation flow and is limited to one platform at a time (e.g., Instagram only). This filter is not available when using the AI Assistant flow.
Example
Example
Start with followers of outdoor brands (Include), exclude IT professionals (Exclude), then filter for women aged 25-44 (Filter).
Criteria are displayed as grouped cards with badges for easy review.
5. Review and Activate
Review all criteria cards showing your targeting selections. When you are satisfied with the audience definition:
Click the Activate button in the top right corner.
Processing takes approximately 1-2 business days before the audience is available for use in a persona.
You can monitor the status; the audience will show as Implementing during processing.
Important Notes
Expect CPM rate increases of at least $1 when using social audiences due to third-party data costs.
Plan ahead given the 1-2 business day processing window.
Balance reach and precision when setting parameters: the more specific your targeting, the smaller but more relevant your audience will be.