Identify a specific target audience informed by an analysis of the Sensis data.

From the preliminary research I did for my last post, I’ve continued to look into the social media habits of 18-29 year olds.Whilst the youngest age bracket in the Sensis data is 18-29, I’d like to scale back my target audience for this project. Therefore, my target audience is 13-24 year olds. The research in the Sensis data is however, still applicable.

It goes without saying that these are the people who have had access to social media from a young age. This means that these people have had social media when they were most impressionable; as children and teenagers. For this reason, I believe that social media has a greater impact on this demographic’s mental health. That’s not to say that social media doesn’t affect all demographic’s mental health but you have to make a start somewhere. I’d like to create a community that doesn’t dissuade anyone from participating but simultaneously, this community needs to be trusting of who they’re engaging with. Thus, through having a younger target audience, everyone will be of a similar age and may in turn be facing similar issues as well as be striving for the same things. 

Furthermore, I am leaning towards starting an Instagram page for my mental health campaign. Whilst Facebook is most popular across all age brackets, Instagram is more popular with younger people; 74.8% of 18-29 year olds use Instagram whereas only 40.9% of 40-49 year olds do (Sensis 2020). Therefore, I can hone in on this younger demographic. 

Furthermore, I have decided that given the current situation, now is the time to learn animation and I believe that short-form animations will fit best on Instagram. From this, I may go on to make long-form animations and this may suit distribution on other platforms such as YouTube. But for now, as I try to get my head around after effects, I’ll continue to test out what will work best.

Reference: 

Sensis 2020, Have Your Say Australia, company report, Sensis, viewed 23 March 2020.