Audience identification: how to find and understand the right communities with Pulsar
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Pulsar Power Up: Audience Identification
How do you truly understand your audience? Whether you're pitching to a niche group, launching a campaign, or refining your messaging, knowing who you're speaking to is everything. In this Power Up session, Pulsar's Beth Hallet-Milner shows us how to approach audience identification using three key methods: panel searches, the Communities integration with Audiense, and demographic-led reports.
Panel searches: a powerful but often overlooked feature
Social listening often begins with topics or keywords - but Pulsar TRAC lets you flip that approach by starting with people instead. Panel searches enable you to track specific users across platforms like X, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok and more. You can use this to monitor the content strategy of aspirational or competitor brands, keep tabs on influencers or journalists to understand their tone and content mix, or build panels using bio keywords like 'theatre lover', 'teacher', or 'MP'.
Communities integration: turning conversations into insight
Say you’re tracking a topic like Vinted or Facebook Marketplace - with the Communities tab, you can go one step further. You can segment the real people behind the conversation to understand who they are and what drives them.
This integration reveals demographic and professional details, shared interests and media affinities, as well as tone of voice and sentiment. Each community, whether they're art lovers, vintage fashion fans or Taylor Swift stans, displays unique content patterns and behaviours.
Once segmented, you can dive deeper using Pulsar's Audiense integration to map affinities and content preferences, push segments back into TRAC as panel searches to track future conversation, or filter your dashboard to focus on specific groups. This opens up new ways to tailor your strategy by segment.
Starting with demographics
If you’re beginning with a clear idea of your target audience, for example, women aged 18–24 in Manchester, you can go straight into Audiense and launch a report based on profile attributes. You can then choose to segment them by affinity (based on shared interests) or interconnection (based on social graph overlaps).
Once the report is live, you’ll get access to insights across personality traits, brand and media preferences, buying mindsets and content engagement. And if you want to keep analysing them in real time, you can send that audience back into Pulsar as a panel search.
Why it matters
Better audience insight means better strategy. Whether you're refining campaign messaging, identifying new communities or tailoring tone to personality type, audience-first thinking makes all the difference.
Panel searches and segmentation are key to building relevance, resonance and reach.
Watch now
Watch the full recording of Pulsar Power Up: Audience Identification below.
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