How to Find the Right Audiences on Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat
4/17/2025
In Google Ads, campaigns are built around specific search intent or broad search interests. In contrast, for paid social, the focus is on targeting interests, which requires aligning content with specific passions and behaviors.
Paid social isn’t simple, and building high-performing audiences from scratch on Meta, TikTok, or Snapchat can be time-consuming and inefficient. Each platform has its own rules, limitations, and quirks, and what works on one often doesn’t translate to another.
At FanIQ, over the past five years, we've partnered with more than 100 teams, festivals, and venues, gaining valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. Our 50+ pre-built lifestyle audiences are ready to use and optimized for performance across eight different paid social platforms, eliminating the need for extensive trial and error.
Below is our methodology on how to get the most of your marketing dollars in paid social.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
Meta’s Ads Manager can be overwhelming, offering thousands of interests to choose from. Once you get into the weeds, experienced Ads Manager Users know how tough it is to build the upper-funnel with qualified buyers.
Here’s the 5-step sequence approach we take to building audiences on Meta:
1. Start with Lifestyle Mapping
Think about the audience that you want to target. To do that well, you should define not just who they are but how they live. Are they football bettors who also love Barstool humor? Or moms who casually follow the NBA? This lifestyle-mapping provides the nuance to really connect with fans at a personal level with relevant content.
2. Find the Overlapping Interests
Once on the platform, start by identifying the high-level interests: Fitness, Travel, Music, Sports, Movies. However, one problem with this high-level approach is that Meta's categories can be outdated and don't always accurately reflect the more nuanced interests that really unlock engagement. For example, an “NFL” audience is just as likely to target a fantasy footballer who watches every weekend as someone who hasn’t watched a game in years.
3. Add Layers for Intent
To further curate these audiences, add more specific interests, along with behavioral signals. Examples of these are “engaged shoppers” or demographic details like age and income, but go too far, and these audiences become too narrow to actually be effective.
4. Run Multiple Variations
To test effectiveness, build 3–5 versions of the audience, tweaking one layer at a time—maybe swapping out Barstool for ESPN or adjusting the age range.
5. Analyze and Adjust Constantly
Even if one build works today, performance can change quickly. Meta’s algorithm rewards the audience’s freshness and penalizes stagnation. That means constant iteration is required just to stay effective.
Let’s look at how to build an audience using one of our FanIQ Lifestyle Audiences in Meta—Experience Seekers. We define this group as doers who are always on the hunt for their next outing. They’re not necessarily picky about the event itself—they just want to get out and experience new things. As the image below shows, this audience is made up of 8 different interests and 1 behavior.
TikTok
TikTok is a different ballgame when it comes to interest-based targeting. While audience signals are newer, the categories are less granular, and much of the performance is tied to creative context, not just targeting.
To build an effective interest audience here, follow these steps:
1. Think in Personas, Not Just Demos
TikTok's targeting capabilities are broad, allowing for the targeting of interest groups, content types, hashtags, and search terms. Think about these audiences based on “vibes”—like “funny sports fans” or “Gen Z bettors who love memes”—and reverse engineer those into targeting terms.
2. Choose Broad Interests Strategically
TikTok provides general categories like “Sports,” “Gaming,” or “Fitness” and it’s essential to select the appropriate base general interest group for your target audience. If you only select a broad interest on TikTok, the algorithm will still target that broad audience, but it won’t necessarily reach the people you want. To connect with audiences at a personal level, you need to build deeper intent signals.
3. Layer with Narrow Interest Groups
To try and get more specific, add in hashtags or specific content categories like “Sports Commentary” or “Fantasy Sports.” But go too narrow, and the reach will decline—TikTok prefers broad inputs with strong signals from the creative.
4. Test Persona Variations
Build 3–4 audiences targeting slightly different sides of the same persona: one skewing younger, one trendier, one more traditional. Identifying which version of your creative resonates with a particular audience is essential.
5. Monitor Performance Holistically
Because TikTok’s targeting is looser, performance is often tied to how well your ad creative matches the interest signals. So it’s important to look beyond CTR and evaluate engagement across the full funnel—watch time, drop-off points, and eventual conversions. Watch time, in particular, is a key signal: if users consistently watch a piece of content beyond the 50% mark, it suggests strong alignment between creative and audience interest.
Here’s how we build an Experience Seeker in TikTok:
Snapchat
Snapchat’s interest targeting is the most limited of the three, but that doesn’t mean it’s easier. In fact, the lack of granularity can make it harder to find the right audience. For example, it’s impossible to target fans of specific NBA teams as you can only target “Basketball Fans”. Another example, for music marketers, is that there are few sub-genres, there is no audience for “Reggae Fans”.
Here’s our 5 step guide to building interest audiences on Snap:
1. Start with Snap Lifestyle Categories
These are pre-defined audience buckets like “Sports Fans” or “College Students.” They’re vague, but often your only starting point.
2. Stack Overlapping Interests
Snap lets you layer multiple of these interest categories—combine “Basketball” + “Betting” + “Sports Podcasts” to get closer to the user you actually want.
3. Build Multiple Audience Iterations
Create 3–5 audience variations that range from ultra-broad (“All Sports Fans”) to more niche (“Basketball + Sports Betting Enthusiasts”). Then test which one of your creative actually resonates.
4. Regularly Adjust to Avoid Burnout
Snapchat ads generally have a shorter lifetime than other platforms. This is due to Snapchat having a smaller and younger user base as well as fewer ad units than other platforms. Keep your content up to date and refresh these interest groups every few weeks to maintain performance.
Here’s how we build an Experience Seeker audience on Snapchat:
Or… Just Use FanIQ
The reality is: Building these audiences yourself is time-intensive, expensive, and unpredictable. That’s why at FanIQ, we’ve done the work for you.
Through years of strategic testing and investment, we’ve developed finely-tuned lifestyle audiences that perform across Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. The outcome?
✅ 50+ pre-built interest audiences per platform
✅ Battle-tested, optimized, and ready to plug in
✅ Tailored to real fan behaviors, not just generic interests
No guesswork. No wasted spend. Just results.
Want help figuring out which FanIQ audience fits your campaign? Hit us up.
