Social segmentation is in common use across many disciplines like sociology, marketing and public relations. The Social segmentation practice generally seeks a group of people who commonly hold social, cultural, economic or lifestyle traits. Social segmentation may be determined by wealth, location, education, age and sex. McDonalds leverages its social presence not only through its official Facebook Page and Twitter accounts but also through local content helping their regional co-ops with excellent social segmentation tools. Stoneyfield Organic's YoBaby Yogurt has a popular Facebook page to making good use of social segmentation or social market segmentation. They use Skyttles's Facebook analytics tools to analyse conversations for common sentiment words of women aged 25-34.
In the social sciences, social segmentations range from groupings from politics to culture and beliefs. Audience segmentation divides people into unique subgroups based on demographics, product usage, communication behavior, media use and psychographics.
In Public Relations Theory of James E. Grunig, the view is that people form around issues. Stakeholder theory by R. Edward Freeman in the book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, wrote that people can be grouped together because they have a 'stake' in an organisation.
Social segmentation is useful in relationship building, marketing and advertising that is relevant to the understanding, needs and interaction for such groups. Innovative social segmentations are being used as social media is enabling marketers to dig deep and get excellent insights about consumers. Social media to segmentation helps in tapping into natural, organic groupings of people communicating about interests that matter to them.