Visualizing Targeted Audiences

Users of social networks can be passionate about sharing their political convictions, art projects, or business ventures. They often want to direct their social interactions to certain people in order to start collaborations or to raise awareness about issues they support. However, users generally have scattered, unstructured information about the characteristics of their audiences, making it difficult for them to deliver the right messages or interactions to the right people. Existing audiencetargeting tools allow people to select potential candidates based on predefined lists, but the tools provide few insights about whether or not these people would be appropriate for a specific type of communication. We introduce an online tool, Hax, to explore instead the idea of using interactive data visualizations to help people dynamically identify audiences for their different sharing efforts. We provide the results of a preliminary empirical evaluation that shows the strength of the idea and points to areas for future research.