Developing personas is a crucial marketing practice, and social is no exception.
Understanding how various audience segments interact, amplify, and ultimately become customers is essential to any sophisticated social strategy. Audience personas can inform content creation, engagement tactics, and fuel the rest of your marketing funnel with important top-of-funnel data.
Before developing audience personas, you need to understand what they are:
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
- Hubspot’s “Why You Need Buyer Personas“
When it comes to planning content for the buyer’s journey and developing a strategy to drive the most value from your social programs, personas are an important component, helping you create a strategy tailored to the users who are best suited for your product, and most likely to buy.
But before relying on your own assumptions about your perfect customer, start with the data. As a social marketer, we have loads of it at our fingertips, with several places to look.
Facebook Insights Data
For a quick demographic breakdown, there’s no better place to turn than Facebook’s own Insights feature.
Facebook Insights breaks down your audience so you can understand the ages, counties, and cities of your fans, engaged fans, and more.
Simply Measured’s Facebook Page Insights Report breaks down demographic data by page fans, engaged users, and reached users, giving you a complete understanding of the impact you have on specific demos.
Understanding these basics about your social audience is an essential starting point when developing personas, giving you the foundation to build upon. In the above example, it’s apparent that the most active users engaging with this brand’s page are aged 24-35, and located in the United States. It’s possible that your company’s marketing personas don’t align perfectly with this data, which will also help you make adjustments to your social content if it isn’t reaching the ideal audience.
Profile Data
By analyzing the profiles of your Twitter (or LinkedIn) audience, you can pull out some key data around the users that have opted into receiving your content.
Simply Measured’s Twitter Follower Report showcases (among other things) the top keywords used in the profiles of your followers.
Analyzing your Twitter followers will also give you insight into their Klout topics, time zone, audience size, and Tweet frequency. These interests are important when creating a content strategy that will engage.
Content Analysis
Don’t stop at demographic data. Take a look at which content is resonating with your audience. This can tell you as much about those potential customers as anything.
Simply Measured’s Facebook Content Analysis Report allows you to see the types of content that are resonating with your audience.
By looking at engagement data, at a page level, or by tagging content and grouping by various personas, you can round out the picture of where and how users interact with your brand, and what you should spend more time doing.
When testing these components with your own account, it’s important to measure the success and optimize based on your own personal results. Click the link below to learn how Simply Measured’s full package of free Facebook measurement tools can help you understand your content.
Ready to get started? Check out a free Facebook Fan Page analysis by clicking the link below, and check out the other free reports offered by Simply Measured.