Social media seems to get more unpredictable with each passing year. In 2025, marketers are dealing with increased competition, ever-changing algorithms, and users craving endless short, snackable content. All that said, social media remains one of the best ways to find new customers. If organic growth is your goal, it’s important to create a strategy that reaches social media users in the way that works best in 2025. This guide will walk you through how to build an audience from scratch online.
6 Steps to Build Your Audience
When you start out, social media marketing can feel like you’re standing on a stage, staring out across an empty auditorium. Filling those seats takes time, but a targeted approach can help ensure you not only have a following, but that your following is engaged. The below steps will help you target and attract the right social media followers.
1. Set a Goal
U.S. consumers have more than a dozen prominent social media platforms at their disposal, and that presents a challenge for marketers. Justin Mauldin, founder and CEO at Salient PR, explains that in 2025, your first step in building an audience should be knowing why you exist as a brand. Think of it as an overarching mission, with all your messaging laddering up to that.
“Define a purpose — something bigger than a product or service — that shapes every piece of content you put out into the world,” he recommends. “When you’re just starting out, you can’t be everything to everyone. Focus on a specific group, find out where they hang out online, and show up there consistently with valuable, insightful, and authentic content.”
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Your target audience should drive your strategy, so it stands to reason that you’ll need to identify that audience early on. As marketing, branding, and revenue strategist Wendy Shore points out, your target audience shapes everything, from your messaging to the platform where you’ll focus your time and energy.
“Different audiences engage on different platforms, so knowing who you’re speaking to helps you show up in the right place with the right message,” Shore explains. “For example, if you’re targeting small business owners or job seekers, LinkedIn is likely the best platform. If your audience is mompreneurs, Instagram might be a better fit. The key is understanding where your ideal audience spends their time and focusing your efforts there.”
3. Pick a Platform
Where you post matters as much as what you post. Your strategy should be different from one platform to another since, as mentioned, social media demographics vary so dramatically. If you’re posting videos to Instagram, for instance, you’d likely keep in mind that the audience skews younger than Facebook.
Aniket Mishra, founder at Born21 Media, suggests choosing just one platform and dominating it. For B2B businesses, he recommends LinkedIn, since most decision-makers are on that platform. B2C businesses should consider Instagram and TikTok, which bring a higher chance of virality and faster growth.
“As a small business owner, you don’t have the marketing budget to go wide,” he explains. “So, spend less. Pick one platform based on where you think your audience might be and start creating there.”
4. Create the Right Content
It’s important to keep your overall goals in mind with each piece of content you create. If your goal is to gain followers, Shore recommends creating content with the intent of going viral, even if that content doesn’t relate to your business. But if you’re going for sales, she stresses the importance of making “edutaining content,” which is content that engages customers while also educating them. You should also add a clear call to action at the end of each edutaining post.
“A smaller, engaged audience is far more valuable than a large audience that followed you for a cat video,” Shore stresses. “Track the right metrics — are people reaching out? If they are, your content and call to action are working.”
5. Incite Action
No matter what type of content you’re creating, if it doesn’t lead to action, it won’t help you reach your goal. A good call to action incites clicks by communicating exactly what you want someone to do next. “Claim your free offer” or “get started now” are both simple, straightforward calls to action that encourage clicks.
“A common mistake is forgetting the call to action, or giving too many,” Shore adds. “Keep it simple. Lead your audience to one offer, not multiple.”
6. Engage
Social media marketing can all too easily become a one-way conversation, but as Shore points out, adding followers is only part of the equation. You should also focus on building relationships with those followers to ensure long-term loyalty.
“They say content is king, but commenting is queen,” she urges. “Engaging with other people’s posts helps you build real connections — conversations that lead to chatting in the DMs, virtual coffees and, eventually, business opportunities. You need to take the conversation offline. That’s where the real magic happens.”
Building an Audience vs. Finding Clients: Key Differences
Every business needs customers, but the work you do to entice people to buy your products is different from what you do to build a social media following. Here are some key differences between these two goals.
Direct vs. Indirect Sales
Whatever your marketing strategy, your goal is likely to make money. Whether you sell products or services, you want to bring people into your ecosystem who will eventually buy from you. But as Shore explains, building an audience is a more indirect way to achieve that goal — think of it more as a long-term strategy focused on attracting and nurturing a group of people who find value in your content.
“The focus is on creating content that provides insights, education, or entertainment, keeping people engaged over time,” she says. “It’s about building trust and relationships rather than making an immediate sale. These are people who may not be ready to buy now, but follow you for the value you provide — and hopefully, over time, some will convert into clients.”
When you’re working to earn a new customer, though, you’ll attack it in a more direct manner. This means your marketing efforts are solely focused on sales rather than building and fostering a community.
“Instead of broad visibility, the goal is to identify the right people and move them toward a buying decision,” Shore says. “The key is clarity — knowing the one problem you solve and ensuring you’re speaking to the right audience. You’re looking for people who are ready to take action now.”
Connection Depth
Although building an audience and finding customers are related, Mauldin reiterates that they aren’t the same. Your audience will grow around your brand as they see real value in your content. Although finding customers can be more immediate, the exchange is more transactional.
“The tone is different,” he explains. “When you speak to an audience, you’re building trust and relationships. When you speak to potential customers, you’re often zeroing in on the immediate benefits of buying or signing up.”
Success Metrics
You’ll look at certain factors when you’re building a social media audience. These include:
- Follower/subscriber growth: How many new followers and subscribers did certain posts bring?
- Engagement rate: How many likes, comments, and shares are you getting?
- Click-through rates (CTRs): How many clicks is a particular piece of content getting?
- Tags: Are people tagging you in their social media posts?
When you’re acquiring new customers and clients, your metrics will be different — you might look at conversions instead of CTRs, for instance. When people click on a piece of content, do they actually buy? “A large audience alone doesn’t generate revenue,” Shore says. “In fact, you can build a highly profitable business with just 1,000 engaged followers.”
Sprout Social and Hootsuite are both great tools for tracking social media performance. Google Analytics is a free tool that can complete the picture by helping you compare your paid and organic efforts.
Key Takeaways
In 2025, the competitive social media landscape means brands must work even harder to gather followers. The first step is to know your goal and identify the type of consumers who are interested in what you’re offering. Then you can create a strategy that doesn’t just attract large numbers of people, but helps you connect with your customers and build a highly engaged online following as well.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Building vs growing your audience: What are the differences?
If you’re building an audience from scratch, your strategy will dramatically differ from the strategy you choose when you’re growing an existing audience. Mishra explains that building an audience is establishing long-term trust.
“Building an audience is about educating, entertaining, or inspiring for free,” Mishra explains. “Free is the key. There is no hard sell involved: You’re providing a value-first approach with your content to attract a cold audience and become the go-to expert/thought leader in your industry.”
After growing your audience, you’ll focus more on direct monetization. Mishra says a content strategy is important with this approach.
“This is also the bottom of the funnel content where you try to solve core issues the audience faces and then subtly insert your product/service, showcasing how that solves the issues,” Mishra advises. “This is focused on ‘conversion’ and not on ‘engagement’ like audience building. A good framework to follow is 70% audience building content and 30% selling content (finding new customers). One attracts a cold audience, the other converts the cold audience into warm and then to the sales.”
What are the four main things we should use when defining an audience?
Experts look at four major segments when defining consumer markets. They are:
- Demographic: This refers to the statistical makeup of your audience, including details like age, gender, nationality, and education level.
- Geographic: The physical location of your target customers plays a large role in how you market. Geography includes whether they’re rural or urban, their nearby amenities and resources, and the typical climate of their physical location.
- Psychographic: Unlike demographics, this characteristic refers to the psychological makeup of your target audience. This includes your audience’s lifestyle habits, personal interests, moral values, and attitudes.
- Behavioral: What type of products does your target audience typically purchase? Which brands earn their loyalty? What are their typical product usage habits?
“Building an audience takes time, and with so much noise, it’s harder than ever to get eyes on your content,” Shore says. “Don’t get discouraged. Everyone starts with zero followers. Most people give up — the key is to show up consistently.”
How do you build an audience on Instagram?
Instagram is popular with advertisers thanks to its high population of adults between the ages of 25 and 44, and its visual setup. But building an audience can take months of effort, so it’s important to know your plans from the start. Carradean Farley, co-founder at Periscope Media, recommends focusing on planning and strategy, which means conducting research on your target audience and scripting videos to match.
“Then, it’s about making enough content so the business owner has a big enough data set,” continues Farley. “This allows them to analyze what was successful and what wasn’t, replicate what was successful, and continue that loop to continue to grow. A lot of this learning can be done by analyzing the two to five biggest players in a respected niche and see what they’re creating content about, what their hooks are, what their scripts are, and what their editing style is, then replicating what’s successful until a business owner has enough experience to put their own spin on it.”
