I love reading the monthly briefings from the Trendwatching team. This year, they called out “Twinsumers” and “Social-lites” as part of their 11 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2011.
Grow Your Band’s Audience charts a course for finding “your perfect audience.” That’s not the audience in your scene, your family, or your neighborhood. Your perfect audience is the audience that’s not convenient for you to find. It’s the audience that’s waiting for you, ready to receive what you have to offer, ready to support you.
Finding them is the hard part, because you have to connect yourself through your existing personal network to seek them out.
However, the twinsumer idea intrigues me. Trendwatching uses the phrase to describe consumers that believe themselves to be pretty individualized, even though they share a lot of “likes” and “favorites” with other consumers.
Let’s say you’re a singer-songwriter. Five of the folks in your perfect audience have Facebook pages, on which they “like” both Shawn Colvin and Jack Johnson. You might not sound like either of those artists, but the commonality is unusual. If you started searching profiles for more people who like both Shawn Colvin and Jack Johnson, you might just find “twinsumers” who would also like your music if they heard it. You’ve got the basis for either a good Facebook ad campaign or a grassroots outreach effort.
Either way, your search becomes far more focused when you know what you’re looking for.