Discussion: Do You Know Your Audience?
For technical documentation, it's best to set a minimum expected level, but for dramatic writing, I think that maximum better.
It's a difficult balance to achieve. You don't want to insult your audience with exposition. But you don't want to lose them completely either. For example, this kind of dialog makes excessive use of exposition:
[Ops]
WORF: Where are they? They should've been back hours
ago.
O'BRIEN: Maybe the meeting with Starfleet Command took
longer than they thought it would.
KIRA: Then why haven't Sisko or Dax contacted us?
The above dialog is written specifically to get the audience up to speed. It's a pretty unnatural interaction, but it saves time.
On the other hand, I think the show Better Call Saul achieves the proper level of this type of writing rather well. But I've heard people describe the show as "slow." I don't think so, but this is probably an artifact of the writers avoiding lazy exposition. And if that's true, I think it's a good call.
Knowing your audience is not easy. Some readers don't mind walls of text. Some can't tolerate long-winded rants.
Your audience might prefer videos instead of an article. They might routinely skip the article and go straight to the comments.
On top of that, your audience might arrive because your article came up from a search engine query.
So how can you ever really know your audience?
I'm looking to virally monetize your eyeballs by selling them for transplants.
Also see:
I guess one way to know your audience on Steemit is based on how many upvotes and comments you get on a post. In a word, "engagement". Thanks for the important reminder.
Yep, that's the ticket. :D
Knowing your audience is pretty hard hard in offline world but a lot harder here. I hope that we'll live that day when people will join steemit for the great content, not only for the money. Good reminder, thanks)
i think my issue is that I write on a diversity of subjects so I do not have one audience but a overlap of many layers. Maybe I have not discovered my audience. You would have thought with 306 followers I would have. Don't know if they all get the feeds. I think one must develop the relationships with each follower. That takes work because the more you have the harder it is. It may be better to have 3 dozen devoted follower than 300 signed on follower. I am still learning. Thanks for sharing.
I like to imagine there's a 1 in 10 rule. One person writes what ten others are thinking. Maybe it's not true, but it helps me get a picture.
There are some blogs that try to stick to a single topic. I think that's a good strategy, but I don't use it, primarily because I don't think there are very many people out there with my exact interests.
So, this is in direct opposition to my first statement. I'm unique, but no one else is. Silly, right?
And you need to have a great intro. 1st 60 seconds is a must.😄
Nice post!!
For me that's the tricky part: "building a relationship with your readers", I already have a hard time building relationships with people I meet in person o_o
Thank you, this will make me reflect! I must rethink, and try to get to know my target audience so that I can have assertive strategies and get recognition from the blog, it's a slow and laborious process, but the result really pays off. With knowledge it is possible to make the right decisions and achieve success. When in doubt, decide on: Doing what I like or like what I do. If I choose to do just what I like I'm mistaken.
Lol. Good post. It's kinda like a seesaw. Hard to tell if your up or down. In today's time you have a ever changing audience on the internet.
It is very difficult to know the target audience here at steemit when we post diversified content.
Agreed, so hard to know your audience. People are so diverse, their tastes in consumption of content included. Guess you could always poll them and see if you could gain any insight(s) that way!