How to find where your customers are on social media

Key takeaways

Ask 10 recent customers which platforms they opened yesterday. That single question beats every demographic report, because published data describes the UK population and you need to know about the few hundred people who actually buy from you.

• Ask 10 recent customers directly. 20 minutes of calls beats a week of desk research.
• Check your own analytics referral data first. It is free and it is about your buyers.
• Search your brand name on each platform. Where people mention you is a strong signal.
• Check where your last 20 enquiries came from, not where your followers are.
• Published demographics are a tiebreaker, never the decision.

Why do published demographics mislead small businesses?

Because they describe a national population and you sell to a segment of it, usually within one region and one narrow buying role. A chart showing that a platform reaches most UK adults is true and useless if your buyers are practice managers at veterinary surgeries in the North West.

Demographic data answers the question can I reach people here. It never answers the question can I reach my people here, and that is the question platform selection actually turns on.

• Choose the right social media platforms for a UK small business

How do you ask customers which platforms they use?

Call 10 customers who bought in the last 90 days and ask three questions in this order. Which social apps did you open yesterday? Where do you look when you need to check out a supplier? And how did you first hear about us?

Ask about yesterday rather than in general, because in general produces the answer people think sounds right and yesterday produces the truth. The third question is the one that usually surprises people, because the answer is frequently a recommendation rather than a platform at all.

• Run social media audience research without a research budget

What can you learn from your own data for free?

More than most businesses realise, and it costs nothing. Five sources, in order of usefulness.

• Website referral traffic in GA4: which social domains send visits, and which of those convert.
• Your enquiry form's how did you hear about us field. If you do not have one, add it today.
• Your inbox: count the last 20 enquiries by origin, including calls that mention a platform.
• Platform search: search your business name on each channel to see where you are discussed.
• Your follower lists: how many followers are actual customers rather than other suppliers?

• Track every website enquiry to its source

What does the follower audit usually reveal?

That a large share of a small UK business's followers are competitors, suppliers, agencies and staff. It is a deflating exercise and an extremely useful one.

Take your most recent 50 followers on each channel and categorise them: customer, potential customer, supplier, competitor, agency, irrelevant. A channel where under a fifth are customers or potential customers is not reaching your market, whatever the follower count says. We have seen accounts with several thousand followers where fewer than one in ten could ever buy.

• Reaching small business owners on social media

How do you check where buyers research suppliers?

Separately from where they spend leisure time, because they are rarely the same place. Someone can spend an hour a day on a video platform and still check every supplier on a professional network or a review site.

The practical test is to ask customers what they looked at between first hearing your name and contacting you. For UK service businesses the honest answer is usually your website, your Google Business Profile reviews, and one social profile used as a credibility check rather than a discovery channel. That changes which platform deserves investment and which simply needs to be current.

• Website trust signals that make visitors enquire

When is the answer not a social platform at all?

Often, and it is worth saying plainly. For many UK trades, clinics and local services, the honest finding from this research is that customers arrive through search, recommendation and Google Business Profile, and that social media is where they check you afterwards.

That is not an argument for abandoning social. It is an argument for demoting it from lead source to credibility asset, which changes the budget, the effort and the metric you judge it on. Judging a credibility asset on enquiry volume will always make it look like a failure.

• Local SEO for a small business website

What does this look like in practice?

A UK equipment hire business we worked with was convinced its customers were on a video-first platform, because that is where the sector's content was being made. Ten customer calls produced a different answer: site managers used a messaging app all day, checked the website on a phone in a van, and never opened the video platform during working hours.

The plan changed from video production to a click-to-chat messaging setup and a faster mobile site. Content output fell by around two thirds and enquiries rose, because the effort finally landed where the decision was being made.

• Add a WhatsApp button to your website

What do you do when the answers conflict?

Trust the enquiry data over what customers say, and what customers say over published demographics. People misremember their own behaviour, particularly about time spent on their phones, so an answer that contradicts your own referral data is usually the answer that is wrong.

Where the conflict is genuine, it normally means you have two customer segments rather than one. A business hearing two different answers from two clearly different groups has learned something more useful than a single clean result: it now knows which segment is worth more and can choose the channel that serves that one.

Next step

Block 90 minutes this week. Sixty minutes for 10 customer calls, 30 minutes in your analytics and inbox. You will finish with a better answer than any agency deck built from national demographic data, because it will be about your buyers rather than the country.